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It is, I believe, personality above all that sets Virgil and Horace higher than Catullus and Ovid; Chaucer than Dryden; Shakespeare than his contemporaries. Many Elizabethans could write at times blank verse as enchanting as his; but he alone could conceive a Hamlet or an Imogen.

— F. L. Lucas Style (1955)

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More quotes by F. L. Lucas

Tiresome as intellectuals can be, even they are probably much less menacing and pernicious to the world than anti-intellectuals.

The Search for Good Sense (1958)

Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm.

And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.

Style (1955)

Most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed.

Style (1955)

Self-determination must stop somewhere. In politics, as in physics, you come to a point where you cannot go on splitting things.

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