226 Quotes by Harold Bloom

[Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

According to the myth, Prometheus steal fire to free us; Iago steals us as fresh fodder for the fire.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

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