226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

Without the Canon, we cease to think.

The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don’t see any way of getting beyond those prophecies.

Shakespeare’s exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

No one dies halfway through the last act. – Heinrich Ibsen.

The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation.

If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and the groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.

But I can’t understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia .

Criticism in the universities, I’ll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It’s Stalinism without Stalin.