French biographers Quotes

“If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Gospels] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor... We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications... That sect [Jews] had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust... Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law... That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore.[Letter to William Short, 4 August, 1820]”

“Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.”

“The great biographers take excessive liberties in denigrating his person, and, in doing so, they make it difficult to comprehend”

“One biographer said Kennedy lived along the line where charm became power.”

“The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of the victim's cheque books.”

“On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.”

“I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.”

“The intellectually-inclined biographers stray from the point that the message is directed through the spoken word at the broad masses and not writing to an inbred, self-adoring intellectual e”

“There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There's a sadness to it, but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.”