Classics Quotes
111 quotes
"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
"If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave."
"A great nose may be an indexOf a great soul"
"…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad."
"O teach me how I should forget to think (1.1.224)"
"Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships."
"nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose"
"Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?"
"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it."
"All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time."
"Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born."
"I live not in myself, but I becomePortion of that around me: and to meHigh mountains are a feeling, but the humof human cities torture."
"I could read the great books but the great books don't interest me."
"Unasked, Unsought, Love gives itself but is not bought"
"Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life."
"But I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days."
"Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels."
"…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives."
"You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!"
"Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man."
"But now, as it is, sorrows, unending sorrows must surge within your heart as well—for your own son’s death. Never again will you embrace him stiding home. My spirit rebels—I’ve lost the will to live, to take my stand in the world of men—"
"The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already."
"I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men."
"I recognized it instantly. It was a made-up story, a fantasy, the tale of four kids who went through a magic wardrobe and found themselves in a strange new world. I'd read it more times than I could remember, and although I sneered at the thought of a magical land with friendly, talking animals, there were times when I wished, in my most secret moments, that I could find a hidden door that would take us allout of this place."
"Every new book we read in our brief and busy lives means that a classic is left unread."
"While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy."
"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
"If you want to find out if someone is a true bookworm or not, give them a thousand page novel and see what happens."
"She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging Young Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her -- she was only an Object of Contempt"
"I can't help suspecting, that there is, or may be some regurgitation from the bath into the cistern of the pump. In that case, what a felicate beveridge is quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat and the dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below."
"I find that the old Roman baths of this quarter, were found covered by an old burying ground, belonging to the Abbey; through which, in all probability, the water drains in its passage; so that as we drink the decoction of the living bodies at the Pump-room, we swallow the strainings of rotten bones and carcasses at the private bath - I vow to God, the very idea turns my stomach!"
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters."
"Rumours voiced by women come to nothing."
"[W]e have reason to ask what artists are working specially for children, and whether they are running with the popular tide or saying something special.... In America, we had the 'parlor gift book' makers, but we also had Howard Pyle."
"I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter."
"I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while."
"It is fatal to suppose the great writer was too wise or too profound for us ever to understand him; to think of art so is not to praise but to murder it, for the next step after that tribute will be neglect of the masterpiece."
"It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written."
"Have you ever felt you were born in the wrong decade, or came just a bit too late and missed out on all the good stuff when it was in its heyday?"
"Come then, put away your sword in its sheath, and let us two go up into my bed so that, lying together in the bed of love, we may then have faith and trust in each other."
"Morning and eveningMaids heard the goblins cry:'Come buy our orchard fruits,Come buy, come buy"
"You, you insolent brazen bitch—you really dare to shake that monstrous spear in Father’s face?"
"There is remedy for all things except death - Don Quixote De La Mancha"
"For fortune having hitherto seconded him in his designs, made him resolute and firm in his opinions, and the boldness of his temper raised a sort of passion in him for surmounting difficulties; as if it were not enough to be always victorious in the field, unless places and seasons and nature herself submitted to him."
"Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known"
"We, men, who work hard to get somewhere in life, to make something of ourselves in life, to mean something to someone, to have what our ancestors never had.....We, men, who toil for a name, respect, livelihood, who are pitied, mocked all for the love of a woman......We men who need to have a coherent existence, and oneness of spirit with a single soul; We, sir, do not deserve such an audience as Ms. Adams. " - Pritchard's letter"
"We, men, who work hard to get somewhere in life, to make something of ourselves in life, to mean something to someone, to have what our ancestors never had.....We, men, who toil for a name, respect, livelihood, who are pitied, mocked all for the love of a woman.....We men who need to have a coherent existence, and oneness of spirit with a single soul; We, sir, do not deserve such an audience as Ms. Adams." - Pritchard's letter"
"The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow."
"God isn't going to scribble across the sky. "The shark is gone."
"Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs... Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?"
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