Harold Bloom quote: "The real 'Hamlet' is of course later, first performed in 1600, then performed with revisions in 1601, and eventually included in the First Folio after Shakespeare's death, ... It really has more in common with the two major works it comes between, the two great comedies 'As You Like It' and 'Twelfth Night'."

If they wish to alleviate the sufferings of the exploited classes, let them live up to their pretens...
HAROLD BLOOM

If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is ...
HAROLD BLOOM

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of...
HAROLD BLOOM

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind...
HAROLD BLOOM

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every c...
HAROLD BLOOM

I think Freud is about contamination, but I think that is something he learned from Shakespeare, bec...
HAROLD BLOOM

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a...
HAROLD BLOOM

Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of...
HAROLD BLOOM

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.
HAROLD BLOOM

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.
HAROLD BLOOM

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.
HAROLD BLOOM

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or ...
HAROLD BLOOM

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been in...
HAROLD BLOOM

What is supposed to be the very essence of Judaism - which is the notion that it is by study that yo...
HAROLD BLOOM

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
HAROLD BLOOM

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, ev...
HAROLD BLOOM

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems t...
HAROLD BLOOM

What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the...
HAROLD BLOOM

Shakespeare is universal.
HAROLD BLOOM

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profound...
HAROLD BLOOM

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage eve...
HAROLD BLOOM

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.
HAROLD BLOOM

Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overh...
HAROLD BLOOM

But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we h...
HAROLD BLOOM

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.
HAROLD BLOOM

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

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginativ...
HAROLD BLOOM

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike
HAROLD BLOOM

How to read "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps a...
HAROLD BLOOM

In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian ...
HAROLD BLOOM

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
HAROLD BLOOM

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
HAROLD BLOOM

Nobody has ever seen the 'Ur-Hamlet,'
HAROLD BLOOM

A play that takes as its burden the meaning of self-consciousness may hint that inner freedom can be...
HAROLD BLOOM

I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time.
HAROLD BLOOM

the best living poet.
HAROLD BLOOM

How To Read and Why.
HAROLD BLOOM

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike , and I don't think there really i...
HAROLD BLOOM

It's hard to think of a rival,
HAROLD BLOOM

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.
HAROLD BLOOM

The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.
HAROLD BLOOM

Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.
HAROLD BLOOM

They include all kinds of fifth-raters.
HAROLD BLOOM

There are a lot of possibilities.
HAROLD BLOOM

He is a great artist. He may be the finest artist among American writers since William Faulkner and ...
HAROLD BLOOM

I think that's not reading because there's nothing there to be read,
HAROLD BLOOM

Reading well is one of the great pleasures
that solitude can afford you, because it is
at ...
HAROLD BLOOM

All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.
HAROLD BLOOM

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of p...
HAROLD BLOOM

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior tex...
HAROLD BLOOM

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.
HAROLD BLOOM

Infinite Jest’ is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.
HAROLD BLOOM

Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.
HAROLD BLOOM

He can’t think, he can’t write. There’s no discernible talent.
HAROLD BLOOM

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket
HAROLD BLOOM

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes
HAROLD BLOOM

Tradition is not only bending down, or process of benign transmission. It is also a conflict between...
HAROLD BLOOM

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue.
HAROLD BLOOM

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

To read in the service of any ideology is not to read at all. The mind's dialogue with itself is not...
HAROLD BLOOM

One mark of originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is strangeness that we eit...
HAROLD BLOOM

Reviewing bad books is bad for the character – WH Auden
HAROLD BLOOM

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.
HAROLD BLOOM

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

Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ours...
HAROLD BLOOM

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.
HAROLD BLOOM

One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.
HAROLD BLOOM

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.
HAROLD BLOOM

I feel like a lot of serious music lives in generalizations - 'Love is a flower,' 'The s...
RACHEL BLOOM

Bad people doing bad things is not interesting. What I find interesting is good people doing bad thi...
AMY BLOOM

Being a gentleman is a worthy goal.
ORLANDO BLOOM

I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so glad to have done ...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Until this movie I have played a boxer, a cowboy, a knight, a prince, an elf and a pirate. I am so g...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Every stylish man should have a copy of 'The Fountainhead' by Ayn Rand on his bookshelf.
ORLANDO BLOOM

My ideal meal varies, depending on the time of year. Lobster on a deck overlooking a beach at sunset...
AMY BLOOM

I'm quite sensitive to women. I saw how my sister got treated by boyfriends. I read this thing t...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Having people jumping in front of you taking a photo can be unnerving.
ORLANDO BLOOM

When you start falling for somebody and you can't stop thinking about when you're going to s...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Watch how you communicate with a woman. Because you're always communicating, even when you'r...
ORLANDO BLOOM

As a child, I was always drawn to heroic characters. I decided I wanted to act when I realised that ...
ORLANDO BLOOM

I am a hopeless romantic and I love to spoil my girlfriends.
ORLANDO BLOOM

Life is about balance, and we all have to make the effort in areas that we can to enable us to make ...
ORLANDO BLOOM

People think getting a new partner is like getting a new car.
ORLANDO BLOOM

When you're young and you're in love and it doesn't work out - it hurts.
ORLANDO BLOOM

A big part of what I wanted to do with this character was go from when I was a boy and try and devel...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Maybe our generation is more about sex, but it feels like romance is dying out.
ORLANDO BLOOM

People come into your life and people leave it... you just have to trust that life has a road mapped...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Success can allow you to try for greatness, can give you an opportunity to take a chance on somethin...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Wear comfortable clothes when you fly; my preference is T-shirt and jeans.
ORLANDO BLOOM

I look forward to working with UNICEF as they continue to make the world a better place for children...
ORLANDO BLOOM

As an actor, you can't think about the end result or the fame; you just have to focus on the day...
ORLANDO BLOOM

I just want to have a nice, happy life.
ORLANDO BLOOM

I have noticed when you get a bunch of dudes in a room together, and you just have one woman or two ...
RACHEL BLOOM

When I was in England doing Romeo and Juliet as a child star, I was interviewed by the British press...
CLAIRE BLOOM

Laura is the perfect guest for Valentine's Day. She's a true professional who is able to discuss sex...
AL BLOOM

The rings are great sellers because they keep the man hard and they stimulate the woman.
AL BLOOM

Her toys are very popular with our customers so we're excited to have them.
AL BLOOM

Laura is the perfect guest for Valentine's Day. She's a true professional who is able to discuss sex...
AL BLOOM

I don't want to do only blockbusters.
ORLANDO BLOOM

Is it better for a woman to marry a man who loves her than a man she loves.
AMY BLOOM

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious ill...
ALLAN BLOOM

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrum...
ALLAN BLOOM

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magi...
ALLAN BLOOM

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the unive...
ALLAN BLOOM

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - t...
ALLAN BLOOM

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industr...
ALLAN BLOOM

Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great...
ALLAN BLOOM

There's an idealism starting to bubble up again. Today's kids aren't the materialist, MBA, Bonfire-o...
ALEXANDER BLOOM

Murdered children, child prodigies - those stories strike the population at a different level than s...
ALEXANDER BLOOM

Kids add an extra weight to whatever is going on,
ALEXANDER BLOOM

She has to be careful that she doesn't become her own road show, in which she becomes someone who go...
ALEXANDER BLOOM

You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.
AMY BLOOM

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- ...
ALLAN BLOOM

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.
ALLAN BLOOM

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not becau...
ALLAN BLOOM

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
ALLAN BLOOM

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completio...
ALLAN BLOOM

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrum...
ALLAN BLOOM

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.
ALLAN BLOOM

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their childre...
ALLAN BLOOM

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school...
ALLAN BLOOM

There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth...
ALLAN BLOOM

Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, has disap...
ALLAN BLOOM

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The sheph...
ALLAN BLOOM

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --t...
ALLAN BLOOM

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contraditory simulacra of community, is the ...
ALLAN BLOOM

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a m...
ALLAN BLOOM

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magi...
ALLAN BLOOM

How can you be in hell while you are in my heart?
ORLANDO BLOOM

If life isn't about human beings and living in harmony, then I don't know what it's about.
ORLANDO BLOOM

Elves are like trees, grounded and focused from the trunk down but graceful and agile on top.
ORLANDO BLOOM

On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the...
PAUL BLOOM

Everyone around me was super-cool and laid back and skinny and tan and volleyball-y, and I was just ...
RACHEL BLOOM

The enjoyment we get from something is powerfully influenced by what we think that thing really is. ...
PAUL BLOOM

I think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent an...
ORLANDO BLOOM

When it comes to meals, there's always a fantastic choice on British Airways.
ORLANDO BLOOM

I have flown with British Airways since I was a very little child, so it feels quite special to have...
ORLANDO BLOOM

As a child, I had the opportunity to meet the captain onboard a British Airways flight. It was so ex...
ORLANDO BLOOM

We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitud...
PAUL BLOOM

It is clear that rituals and sacrifices can bring people together, and it may well be that a group t...
PAUL BLOOM

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the...
ALLAN BLOOM

We are naturally moral beings, but our environments can enhance - or, sadly, degrade - this innate m...
PAUL BLOOM

I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by t...
PAUL BLOOM

Once we accept violence as an adaptation, it makes sense that its expression is calibrated to the en...
PAUL BLOOM

The real problem with natural selection is that it makes no intuitive sense. It is like quantum phys...
PAUL BLOOM

If our moral attitudes are entirely the result of nonrational factors, such as gut feelings and the ...
PAUL BLOOM

Some of the natural world is appealing, some of it is terrifying, and some of it grosses us out. Mod...
PAUL BLOOM

Periods of cooperation between political parties shouldn't be taken for granted; they are a stun...
PAUL BLOOM

If you look within the United States, religion seems to make you a better person. Yet atheist societ...
PAUL BLOOM

Too often, our concern for specific individuals today means neglecting crises that will harm countle...
PAUL BLOOM

If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be noth...
PAUL BLOOM

Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survi...
PAUL BLOOM

It's really difficult working with kids and with babies because they are not cooperative subject...
PAUL BLOOM

Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flex...
PAUL BLOOM

Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to loo...
PAUL BLOOM

Humans are born with a hard-wired morality: a sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. I know thi...
PAUL BLOOM

We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the bal...
PAUL BLOOM

Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others.
PAUL BLOOM

Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But...
PAUL BLOOM

Empathy has some unfortunate features - it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We're of...
PAUL BLOOM

The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be go...
PAUL BLOOM

Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family - that's im...
PAUL BLOOM

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.
ALLAN BLOOM

I came back out here from England and I was there for a while and it was beautiful and it is just gr...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Education is the movement from darkness to light.
ALLAN BLOOM

Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and the...
AMY BLOOM

People tend to forget that in our country, we'd pretty much all be immigrants, except for the Na...
AMY BLOOM

I used to ride motorbikes and drive cars like everything was a racetrack; it was ridiculous. It wasn...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Read. Read until your eyes are sore. Then read some more.
LISA BLOOM

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as m...
PAUL BLOOM

If you think of the ice caps as the fridge of our planet, if your fridge at home died, the food you ...
ORLANDO BLOOM

I remember one time that I was filming a scene in whych my character rides through Troy on a chariot...
ORLANDO BLOOM

I want to do work that has a message and casts a light over an area that's dark. But I'm fun...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Creativity is the key for any child with dyslexia - or for anyone, for that matter. Then you can thi...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Relying on the face might be human nature - even babies prefer to look at attractive people. But, of...
PAUL BLOOM

My standards are based on shows I like, like 'Girls' or 'Arrested Development.' And ...
RACHEL BLOOM

My cousin once told me, 'You're tall, you're handsome - and you're gonna have to apo...
ORLANDO BLOOM

I spent a lot of time listening to people. But it's also true that I liked details and listening...
AMY BLOOM

The best way to look stylish on a budget is to try second-hand, bargain hunting, and vintage.
ORLANDO BLOOM

How does a cosmos without a bearded, bathrobed God in the sky pull off all the things that a bearded...
HOWARD BLOOM

I think that its easy to think of the environment as all doom and gloom and that, 'What can we d...
ORLANDO BLOOM

There's so many confusing messages that you're being sent about being pretty but not too pre...
RACHEL BLOOM

New questions can produce new scientific leaps. They can tiddlywink new flips of insight and underst...
HOWARD BLOOM

I've spent my life pursing excellence as an artist, which is what I always wanted to do anyhow.
CLAIRE BLOOM

I went to Antarctica on a science research boat just to sort of clear my head.
ORLANDO BLOOM

Part of the satisfaction of tattling surely comes from showing oneself to adults as a good moral age...
PAUL BLOOM

Elves have this superhuman strength, yet they're so graceful. Tolkien created them to be angelic...
ORLANDO BLOOM

I am interested in struggle - between our hearts and our head, between principle and desire - and on...
AMY BLOOM

I was the kind of reader in smudged pink harlequin glasses sitting on the cool, dusty floor of the A...
AMY BLOOM

I got to work with one of my heroes, Johnny Depp, and to see how he goes about business, which was r...
ORLANDO BLOOM

You can drive an SUV, but there's a balance. If you do that, maybe use energy-efficient light bu...
ORLANDO BLOOM

When I was prepping for my Broadway debut as Romeo, it really hit me that I had never done that. I h...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Even in the most peaceful communities, an appetite for violence shows up in dreams, fantasies, sport...
PAUL BLOOM

The title 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' is meant to be a deconstruction of a stereotype, and the who...
RACHEL BLOOM

The No. 1 thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence.
RACHEL BLOOM

The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.
AMY BLOOM

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
AMY BLOOM

I'm trying to mix the cool, independent stuff with the big stuff, but it's been difficult fi...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the...
ALLAN BLOOM

Legolas is that kind of action elf who pouts a bit, stares off to the distance, and has a couple her...
ORLANDO BLOOM

Harold Bloom

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