Biography Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old biography quotes, biography sayings, and biography proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

There is properly no history; only biography. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Live your life as if you are writing your Biography. Keshia Chante
Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes. Tom Stoppard
When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication. George Bernard Shaw
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality. Charles Baudelaire
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. Thomas Carlyle
Writing a biography is not a love affair. It's not a marriage. It's a job, it's a piece of work. Hermione Lee
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. Edmund White
A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand. Virginia Woolf
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium. Philip Guedalla
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life. Rebecca West
Life is a biography, not a series of disconnected moments, more or less pleasurable but increasingly tedious and unsatisfying unless one imposes a purposive pattern upon them. Anthony Daniels
All history is biography. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Biography is the only true history. Thomas Carlyle
Our theology must become biography. Tim Hansel
Your biography becomes your biology. Caroline Myss
A photograph is a biography of a moment. Art Shay
Someone calls biography the home aspect of history. Henry Ward Beecher
Your biography is not your destiny, your decisions are. Tony Robbins
Biography is history seen through the prism of a person. Louis Fischer
History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale. Alphonse De Lamartine
There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography. Thomas Szasz
Once the implicit aim of biography was to uplift now it is to unveil. Mark Feeney
Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading. Thomas Carlyle
Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified. Jose Ortega Y Gasset
You can use a biography to examine political power, but only if you pick the right guy. Robert Caro
The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. V. S. Naipaul
For me the fascination with biography is the life of the individual in the context of history. Rachel Holmes
The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps. Edmund Clerihew Bentley
A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked. H. G. Wells
Biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier. Erica Jong
Behind each biography there should always be a rich treasury of unformulated knowledge, a tapestry that has not been unrolled. Iris Origo
Biography cannot be separated from autobiography: that is, the life written about is inextricably entangled with the life of the biographer. Linda Simon
The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others. Samuel Smiles
The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue. Dmitri Shostakovich
A biography is never a biography of one person, of course, but the individual life of your protagonist will never conform. It will always bang up against history. Rachel Holmes
If you read the biography of any great man, you will always notice two things: His mother's contribution in his progress and his teacher's contribution in his growth and development. Narendra Modi
History – a biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us make sure that future generations write our biography. Amit Kalantri
The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed. Thornton Wilder
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography. Tom Stoppard
Almost any biography will have its useful suggestions for making life a success, but none better or more unfailing than the biography of Christ. Robert Baden-Powell
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink. Catherine Drinker Bowen
A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.' Joyce Carol Oates