Quotes by Classicists

To be seeing the world made new every morning as if it were the morning of the first day and then to make the most of it for the individual soul as if each were the last day is the daily curriculum of the mind's desire.
John H. Finley
That typically English characteristic for which there is no English name -esprit de corps.
Frank Adcock
Maturity of mind is the capacity to endure uncertainty.
John H. Finley
There are three types of student: The golden student pays and loans, the silver student pays but does not learn, the bronze student learns but does not pay.
J.C. McKeown
In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.
Roger D. Woodard
My heart is hardy, for I have suffered much on the seas and the battlefield: this will be only something more. But a ravenous belly cannot be hid, damn the thing. It gives a world of trouble to men, makes them fit out fleets of ships and scour the barren sea, to bring misery on their enemies.
W.H.D. Rouse
Let it all go, one foot in the grave and one bag packed. We shall go to our end in the warm glow of the past, burning up the memories, all the clutter given back.
Peter R. Pouncey
Equality has no place for genius.
Allen Bloom
We had practiced bits and pieces of his story, but never the whole thing. In fact, I never heard Michael recount his own tale from start to finish.I wonder now whether this was because the full version would have led me to ask questions that Michael did not want to answer. He had so much to give—stories, reflection, engagement—that somehow none of us ever noticed just how much he was withholding. He could love everybody on the terms on which they needed to be loved, give everybody what they needed to receive; and so, in the end, none of us really knew him. I’ve come to realize that he didn’t quite know himself, either'.
Danielle Allen
Never on me let such wrath lay hold, as the wrath you cherish, you whose valor causes harm!
Augustus Taber Murray
Behind every no entry sign there's a door.
Peter Jones
. . . Most falls aren't free -- there is always the tension, it seems to me, between what you are falling from and what you are falling to.
Peter R. Pouncey
A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of its picture of itself. High and popular art are not in competition here. Both may help citizens decide what they are and what they admire. In our age, however, high art has given up speaking to the body of its fellow citizens. It devotes itself to technical displays that can appeal only to other technicians.
E. Christian Kopff
The least successful athletes, those who have never won any victories, suddenly call themselves trainers.
J.C. McKeown
Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world. And of course it was reciprocal; the world receded on him.
Peter R. Pouncey
Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
Gilbert Highet
Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows.
Frederic Myers
Even the loneliest and most solitary in the universe... the very cold space dust... will eventually come together to form a star.
G.C. Huxley
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
Gilbert Highet