Quotes & Sayings About Classics

Mama, the more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. — Jane Austen

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. — Jane Austen

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences. — Donna Tartt

The years between Roger Bacon's birth, in 1220, and Uthred's death, in 1370, are considered the final flowering of the Middle Ages. They were followed by a longer, grimmer period in Europe, during which the machinery for rooting out heresy defeated enlightened discourse almost completely. The early condemnation of works by William Ockham, Johannes Eckehart, the spiritual Franciscans, and Dante signaled the start of a breakdown in the integrity of Western thought. During this Great Interruption, xenophobia replaced curiosity, interest in Islam and the classics withered, and Muslim thought was anathematized or ignored. Fifty years later, it was no longer wise to learn Arabic, Hebrew, or even Greek. — Michael Wolfe

My mom and dad played this music all the time when I was growing up, so to me songs by Jerry Lee and Fats Domino are the classics, they're the best songs ever. — Chris Isaak

We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer. — Tade Thompson

When I wrote 'Barefoot in Paris,' I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics. — Ina Garten

We were younger. And it's basically like looking at football classics. You see things that you did, you see things that you could've done better and you think about all the good relationships that you had with the cast. — Bubba Smith

To have output you must have input. It helps to go on a period of creative nourishment, or dolce far niente, clearing the brain. Go to bed with the cat, some flouffy pillows, tea and a book which could not in any sense be called improving. Read for fun for a change: superior Chicklit is good, or children's classics. You are not allowed to try and analyse what the author is doing. After a good sleep, go and do something new, or that you haven't done for a while ... — Lucy Sussex

Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength. Sea air was healing, softening, relaxing
fortifying and bracing
seemingly just as was wanted
sometimes one, sometimes the other. If the sea breeze failed, the seabath was the certain corrective; and where bathing disagreed, the sea air alone was evidently designed by nature for the cure. — Jane Austen

Darwin himself, in his day, was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. It was the classics of Marxism that revealed those errors and pointed them out. — Trofim Lysenko

They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. — W. Somerset Maugham

Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics. — John B. S. Haldane

'The Conjuring' is incredibly effective and scary without the use of blood, gore, and death. It's a horror film that emphasizes atmosphere and suspense in the tradition of classics like 'Psycho' or 'The Others.' — Toby Emmerich

Classics postures, when practiced with discrimination and awareness, bring the body, mind, and consciousness into a single, harmonious whole. — B.K.S. Iyengar

It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them. — Erica Jong

This is fan fiction, but it's the fan fiction of a classical scholar who knows his stuff, even if he is a touch irreverent and unorthodox. — Sarah Warning Potentially Off-Topic

I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers. — Piers Anthony

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn? — Jane Austen

My mum is great for keeping hold of old classics - pieces of clothing that never age and never go out of fashion. She also says, 'Make sure you always smile - it makes everything look better!' — Amber Le Bon

For whatever changes and leaves its natural bounds
is instant death of that which was before. — Titus Lucretius Carus

You took something from the King," I said.
"Did I?" the dragon growled. "And what might that be?"
"You know."
"Say it."
"The Prince."
"Ah," the dragon said. "I'm sorry, but your prince is in another castle."
"What?" I was confused. What other castle?
It sighed. "You young people today. Never respecting the classics. — T.J. Klune

Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there. — Kurt Vonnegut

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.'
'You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry.'
'Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the one in the picture?'
'Before either.'
'I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,' said the lad.
'Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?'
'I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do.'
'Well, then you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray.'
'I should like that awfully.'
The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture. 'I shall stay with the real Dorian,' he said, sadly. — Oscar Wilde

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come. — John Green

By reading older books we get a taste of the conversation of Heaven. — John Mark Reynolds

For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. — Henry David Thoreau

The generation now below me were born into a world where if you're a kid with raw talent now, you can roll in and land a lead in a Scorsese film. You don't have to have prove yourself by working up the ranks, doing the classics, and getting the canon under your belt in the way the great Sirs and Dames of mom and dad's generation - the [Ben] Kingsleys and [Helen] Mirrens and [Anthony] Hopkinses and people of that ilk. — Benedict Cumberbatch

He read the classics, the French and the German among others, but primarily the Russian, which enchanted him with their heavy patience. — Tove Jansson

I owe the little formal education I got to my drama teacher, Mr. Pickett, who got us to read Shakespeare, Moliere, and other classics. — Dennis Quaid

I'm a child of the Disney Renaissance, so the new classics are near and dear. I suppose this is a legend more than a fairy tale, but 'Mulan' is easily my favorite. Not only is it a fun, action-packed, beautiful movie, but it's so important for young girls to have. — Victoria Aveyard

When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field. — Thomas S. Kuhn

I do not see how one who is an enemy of the gods can run fast enough away, nor where he can flee to escape, nor what darkness could cover him, nor how he could find a position strong enough for refuge. For all things in all places are subject to the gods, and the power of the gods extends equally over everything. — Xenophon

Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens. — Yukio Mishima

Jimmy Page is an excellent producer. Led Zeppelin I and II are classics. As a player he's very good in the studio, but I've never seen him play well live. He's sloppy. He plays like he's got a broken hand and he's two years old. If you put out a good album and play like a two year old, what's the purpose? — Eddie Van Halen

Nothing touches our lives but it is God Himself speaking. Do we discern His hand or only mere occurrence? — Oswald Chambers

I don't repeat that many styles if I can help, although some have become classics. I try not to repeat. I'd rather surprise people. — Christian Louboutin

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. — John Erskine

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college. — Jennifer Weiner

Lingerer, my brain is on fire with impatience; and you tarry so long! — Charlotte Bronte

Contrary to many young Colleagues, I do believe that it makes sense to study the Classics. — Magnus Carlsen

And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?" "I think so." Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending." "Snap ending." Mildred nodded. "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. — Ray Bradbury

Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in 1949 carrying in his suitcase the annotated works of Thomas Wolfe and Roget's Thesaurus. Four years later, age twenty, he left Chicago with five cartons of classics, bought secondhand out of his spending money, to be stored in his parents' attic while he served two years in the Army. In 1960, when he was divorced from Betsy, there were thirty cartons to be packed from the shelves no longer his; in 1965, when he was divorced from Virginia, there were just under sixty to cart away; in 1969, he left Bank Street with eighty-one boxes of books. — Philip Roth

Stallone is a great writer. He wrote one of the best screenplays ever written. Rocky. It is one of the biggest classics of all time. I think in the past, he was shying away from writing his own stuff, because there is a lot of pressure when you star in something that you write. — Dolph Lundgren

Why a child needs a picture book?
Experts explain why the illustration is so important in the narrative and give tips on how to choose a picture book for your children.

By turning an idea into something reality, illustrated book further fuels the child's fantasy. Recent research on teaching concluded that the best performing students are not the ones who read the classics. The important thing is to allow children access to a variety of reading styles and the pleasure of choosing what they want to read. — Jessie Zane Carter

The American university inherits the missions of two very different institutions: the English college and the German research university. The first pattern prevailed before the Civil War. Curricula centered on the classics, and the purpose of education was understood to be the formation of character. With the emergence of a modern industrial society in the last decades of the nineteenth century, that kind of pedagogy was felt to be increasingly obsolete. Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 as the first American university on the German model: a factory of knowledge that would focus in particular on the natural and social sciences, the disciplines essential to the new economy and the world to which it was giving rise. — William Deresiewicz

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
'Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy — Christina Rossetti

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them. — Italo Calvino

A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse; like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when once overcome. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations. — Tim Blake Nelson

At one time, a freethinker was a man who had been brought up in the conceptions of religion, law and morality, who reached freethought only after conflict and difficulty. But now a new type of born freethinkers has appeared, who grow up without so much as hearing that there used to be laws of morality, or religion, that authorities existed ... In the old days, you see, if a man - a Frenchman, for instance- wished to get an education, he would have set to work to study the classics, the theologians, the tragedians, historians and philosophers- and you can realize all the intellectual labour involved. But nowadays he goes straight for the literature of negation, rapidly assimilates the essence of the science of negation, and thinks he's finished. — Leo Tolstoy

Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues, before I could see her as she really was. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Upon the publication of Goethe's epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward his drama was the rule by which all other Faust adaptations were measured. Goethe had eclipsed the earlier legends and became the undisputed authority on the subject of Faust in the eyes of the new Romantic generation. To deviate from his path would be nothing short of blasphemy. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Classics stay alive because a great actor or a great director wants to do them. — Scott Rudin

I am no bird, no net ensnares me. — Charlotte Bronte

The thing is, what I'm tryin' to say is -
they do get on a lot better without me, I can't help them any. They ain't mean. They buy me everything I want, but it's now - you've-got-it-go-play-with-it. You've got a roomful of things. I-got-you-that-book-so-go-read-it. — Harper Lee

Darling, when you're as old as I am, you cherish the very few musicals that have come your way that you know are great classics. You become their guardian. — Cameron Mackintosh

Like a car that's old enough to be old but not old enough to be a classic, it would be years before people would again appreciate the old town square. — K. Martin Beckner

Being a theater actor, I've done a lot of plays where I've seen someone else play the same role in another production. Especially with the classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams. — Jacki Weaver

Words pass through walls and slip past lock and key,
and numbing cold seeps to our very bones. — Titus Lucretius Carus

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it. — Benjamin Disraeli

It reminded him of the Sound of Music. Myron liked the ole Julie Andrews musical well enough. who didn't? but he always found one song particularly dumb. One of the classics, actually. My Favorite Things. The song made no sense. Ask a zillion people to list their absolute favorite things, and how many of them are going to list doorbells for crying out loud.
You know what, Milly, I love doorbells. To hell with strolling on a quiet beach, or reading a great book, or making love or seeing a broadway musical. Doorbells, Milly, doorbells really punch my ticket. Sometimes I just run up to people's houses and press their doorbells and, well, I think i am man enough to admit I shutter. — Harlan Coben

I am going to stand against him now, though his hands are like flame, though his hands are like flame, and his heart like the shining of iron. — Homer

There's no question that Whale's movies are classics. They were wonderful, and successful. — Bill Condon

There are, I'm depressed to say, many classics I have not yet read and will probably never get around to, though I will not stop short of hospitalizing myself in the attempt. — Glen Duncan

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars,
the trees and flowers were strewing
their cool odos. There was no moon. — Sylvia Plath

The fans of 'Speed' are very different from the fans of 'To Wong Foo,' which are different from 'Donnie Darko.' Look at the classics I've been in: 'No Country for Old Men' ... 'Little Miss Sunshine' ... 'Rain Man' was my first big studio movie! How lucky is that? — Beth Grant

I don't fly to the classics for comfort, as Giles does. I'm too frivolous. Worthy people always read the classics when things are difficult. — Elizabeth Goudge

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me. — Karl Marlantes

Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt
an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics. Long ago. Now, alas, it was too late ... — Agatha Christie

Just because some dreams never see light that doesn't make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborn's but trust me the illusion is worse. — Parul Wadhwa

And what does a person with such a romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics? He asked this as if, having had the good fortune to catch such a rare bird as myself, he was anxious to extract my opinion while I was still captive in his office.
'If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective,' I said, 'I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.'
He laughed. 'The great romantics are often failed classicists. But that's beside the point, isn't it? — Donna Tartt

The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already. — Mary Stewart

As life speeds by, nostalgia has a shorter pregnancy. Games still in progress are given the straight-to-sepia status of "Instant Classics" no matter how oxymoronic that phrase appears. — Steve Rushin

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop ...
It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. — Nelson Algren

The cream of a generation was lost in the mud of Flanders. Etonians went over the top with the Illiad in their knapsacks and Athens in their hearts. To protest that such men were statistically not even a trace among the British soldiers killed is to miss the point. At all times the great majority of people have been ignorant of the classics; but the men who mattered; who governed, declared wars and resisted innovation have always had Latin and Greek. — William Donaldson

The great classics that, as a professional you don't get to do, you do as a student, when you don't know any better. — Marion Ross

The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought. — John Keegan

Nothing is Lie until you get to know the truth, as nothing is false in Dream until you get to know that i'm Dreamer. — The Ek

If we are not our own, but the Lord's, it is clear to what purpose all our deeds must be directed. We are not our own, therefore neither our reason nor our will should guide us in our thoughts and actions. We are not our own, therefore we should not seek what is only expedient to the flesh. We are not our own, therefore let us forget ourselves and our own interests in as far as possible. — John Calvin

It is noteworthy, the researcher further argued, that the inscription on the sword was engraved in the Romanian language, and, consequently, we see that Latin was actually Romanian, and not the invented language that for many centuries has passed for ancient Latin. — Vladimir Lorchenkov

Stick to the classics, and you can't ever go wrong. I see old ladies on the street who have fabulous style and realize it's because they are probably wearing really classic items that they've had for years and years. I think if you find something that suits you, you should just stick to it. — Alexa Chung

Rumours voiced by women come to nothing. — Aeschylus

I do think that theater is a great venue for science fiction, and not just adaptations but also original work. I also think some of the greatest classics of theater have elements of SF, but in theater, as in publishing, sometimes people make arbitrary distinctions. — Edward Einhorn

You are a fool to seek the kind of art you don't like. You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good tastes if you haven't naturally got it. — Ezra Pound

I enjoy classics, but classics are classics for a reason. — Gugu Mbatha-Raw

People who like to fume about the manner in which Disney changed beloved classics are often ignorant of history, not to mention the realities of show business. — Kage Baker

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known — Oscar Wilde

I know what you're thinking. 'How the hell does this broke ass piece of trailer trash know words like caveat,' right? Well guess what? I've read every single book on the New York Times list of 'Top 100 Literary Classics,' not to mention every Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath or Bronte sisters' book ever written. And fuck you very much for judging me, by the way. — Isobel Irons

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics. — Maria Semple

I've never studied the classics, but I'd like to. My teacher offered to show me how the Greeks were able to sculpt someone perfectly. From there, you can go off and experiment - sort of like jazz. Once you learn to play anything, you can break the form and go and do something even bigger. — Channing Tatum

With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues. — Brian Setzer

... but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives. — Homer

He knows I have a soft spot for RLS and not just because he was sick or because we have the same initials but because there's something impossibly romantic about him and because before he started writing Treasure Island he first drew a map of an unknown island and because he believed in invisible places and was one of the last writers to know what the word adventure means. I could give you a hundred reasons why RLS is The Man. Look in his The Art of Writing (Book 683, Chatto & Windus, London) where he says that no living people have had the influence on him as strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Or when he says his greatest friend is D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (Book 5, Regent Classics, London). RLS said: 'When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge, I take them like opium.' And when you read Treasure Island you feel you are casting off. That's the thing. You are casting off and leaving behind the ordinary dullness of the world. — Niall Williams

The Midnight Palace is a great place on the web for the very best on Hollywood Classics! — Keith Thibodeaux

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 — Jane Austen

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise. — Leland Ryken

When Henry handed her a cup of punch she whispered,
"If you want to go on with the seniors or anything I'll be alright."
Henry smiled at her. "You're my date, Scout. — Harper Lee

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman. — Robert Graves