Lytton Strachey

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

The old interests of aristocracy - the romance of action, the exalted passions of chivalry and war - faded into the background, and their place was taken by the refined and intimate pursuits of peace and civilization.

A writer__ promise is like a tiger__ smile

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.

If this is dying I don't think much of it.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.

It was not by gentle sweetness and self-abnegation that order was brought out of chaos; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will.

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.

For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian__ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.