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The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

— Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians (1918)

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More quotes by Lytton Strachey

There are a great deal of a great many kinds of love.

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

It is not [the biographer's] business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them...dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior motives.

Eminent Victorians (1918)

To us, with our broader outlook, our more complicated interests, our more elusive moods, their small bright world is apt to seem uninteresting and out of date, unless we spend some patient sympathy in the discovery of the real charm and the real beauty that it contains.

Landmarks in French Literature (1912)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lytton Strachey (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.