418 Quotes About Classics

Maybe “texts” get worn out. I once debated with Alan Sinfield, a professor in England, who argued that even classics like Shakespeare’s plays lose their appeal or relevance over time. Or maybe he was just saying, as Foucault might have said, that works of literature are “constructed” by cultural materialism and can’t be separated from their political context—just the opposite view from all our “humanists” who think the classics are eternal.

You wan't to know what Classics are?" said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. "I'll tell you what Clasdics are. War and homos." A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.

I shall be very well off, with all the children of a sister I love so much, to care about. There will be enough of them, in all probability to supply every sort of sensation that declining life can need - Emma Woodhouse

Ah, o que eu sei, toda a gente o pode saber! Mas o meu coração só a mim pertence…

it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times

You are too generous to trifle with me.

Amy read Ovid and Virgil and Aristophanes and Homer. She read dry histories and scandalous love poetry (her governesses, who had little Latin and less Greek, naïvely assumed that anything in a classical tongue must be respectable), but mostly she returned again and again to The Odyssey.Odysseus had fought to go home, and so would Amy.

I like to pet nice things with my fingers