Quotes & Sayings About Life Classics

Ranking among the greatest Christmas movie classics, 'It's a Wonderful Life' tells a beautiful story about the priceless value of relationships. — John C. Maxwell

I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse. — Cornel West

'King Lear,' I've been seeing all my life. I mean, the great actors of my lifetime ... to join their company, as it were, by playing a part that's challenged them, is one of the great joys of being an actor who does the classics. — Ian McKellen

In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism — Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference. — Nathaniel Philbrick

You are going, Jane?"
"I am going, sir."
"You are leaving me?"
"Yes."
"You will not come? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My deep love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?"
What unutterable pathos was in his voice! How hard was it to reiterate firmly, "I am going!"
"Jane!"
"Mr. Rochester."
"Withdraw then, I consent; but remember, you leave me here in anguish. Go up to your own room, think over all I have said, and, Jane, cast a glance on my sufferings; think of me."
He turned away, he threw himself on his face on the sofa. "Oh, Jane! my hope, my love, my life!" broke in anguish from his lips. Then came a deep, strong sob. — Charlotte Bronte

I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics; — Donald Miller

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. — Thomas Hardy

I labored in vain reciting the Three Histories
I wasted my time reading the Five Classics
I've grown old checking yellow scrolls
recording the usual everyday names
Continued Hardship was my fortune
Emptiness and Danger govern my life
I can't match riverside trees
every year with a season of green — Han-shan

Don't play with others, or at one day, you will be played by others. — Usama Ejaz

What are we after when we open one of those books? What is it that makes a classic a classic? ... in old-fashioned terms, the answer is that it wll elevate your spirit. And that's why I can't take much stock in the idea of going through a list of books or 'covering' a fixed number of selections, or anyway striving for the blessed state of having read this, or the other. Having read a book means nothing. Reading a book may be the most tremendous experience of your life; having read it is an item in your memory, part of your receding past ... Why we have that odd faith in the magic of having read a book, I don't know. We don't apply the same principle elsewhere: We don't believe in having heard Mendelssohn's violin concerto ...
I say, don't read the classics
try to discover your own classics; every life has its own. — Rudolf Flesch

Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that's the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will e a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn't care whether he lives or doesn't live, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.'
'So, that other God does exist, in your opinion?'
'He doesn't exist, but he does exist. In the stone there' no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I wondered if anybody had ever called her "ma'am," or "Miss Mayella" in her life; probably not, as she took offense to routine courtesy. What on earth was her life like? I soon found out. — Harper Lee

(About "Black Debt" by Steve McCaffery)

'Impersonal' as this text is, it is by no means unemotional or uninvolved. We learn nothing-- at least nothing direct-- about McCaffery's (or his narrator's) personal life, his opinions or ruminations. Nonetheless I would posit that 'Lag' projects a highly particularized way of looking at things, of processing the most diversified information fields-- geology and genetics, archeology and advertising, classics and commercials-- that is finally recognizable in its particular ways of negotiating with language as is the more personal lyric consciousness we expect to find in poetry. — Marjorie Perloff

There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble, having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the years were drawing nigh when she should say, 'I have no pleasure in them', than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed over here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm. — Thomas Hardy

I've heard that lawyers' children, on seeing their parents in court in the
heat of argument, get the wrong idea: they think opposing counsel to be the personal enemies of their parents, they suffer agonies, and are surprised to see them often go out arm-in-arm with their tormenters during the first recess. This was not true of Jem and me. We acquired no traumas from watching our father win or lose. I'm sorry that I can't provide any drama in this respect; if I did, it would not be true. We could tell, however, when debate became more acrimonious than professional, but this was from watching lawyers other than our father. I never heard Atticus raise his voice in my life, except to a deaf witness. — Harper Lee

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for? — J.M. Coetzee

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. — Nick Hornby

You are a curse in my life! — Charles Perrault

As the moon rose, I saw the light illuminate an ancient quote from the Ano Classics, carved into one of the broken lintels: 'All life is an experiment. — Ken Liu

And when this intoxication has worn away ... when every desire is fulfilled and every language learned- when there are no more distant cities to explore; no classics to be studied; not another coin to be stuffed in to one's coffers- what then? One can have all the comforts of the world, but what use are they if there is no comfort in them? — Seth Grahame-Smith

If you are a student, be also a student of the body ... realizing that a broad chest, a muscular pair of arms, and two sinewy legs, will be just as much credit to you, and stand you in hand through your future life, equally with your geometry, your history, your classics, your law, medicine, or divinity. Let nothing divert you from your duty to your body — Walt Whitman

In the Fourth Eclogue also Vergil has still the enthusiasm of youth. Few poems are so rich in magnificent lines or in stirring hopes ... His hope is for a golden age in which there shall be no toil, no commerce, no sorrow, yet he still wants a high development of the intellectual life, the speculations of science, the practical application of knowledge. — John Erskine

All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most ... . — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Life if curious when reduced to its essentials — Jean Rhys

A properly educated leader, especially when harassed and under pressure, will know from his study of history and the classics that circumstances very much like those he is encountering have occurred from time to time on this earth since the beginning of history. He will avoid the self-indulgent error of seeing himself in a predicament so unprecedented, so unique, as to justify his making an exception to law, custom or morality in favor of himself. The making of such exceptions has been the theme of public life throughout much of our lifetimes. For twenty years, we've been surrounded by gamesmen unable to cope with the wisdom of the ages. They make exceptions to law and custom in favor of themselves because they choose to view ordinary dilemmas as unprecedented crises. — James B. Stockdale

A classic yields significantly different meanings when read in different circumstances and moods; on a larger scale, a classic conveys wholly different worlds when read in different times of life, at different stages of experience, feeling, and understanding of life. Classics may be interesting and even entertaining, but people always find they are not like books used for diversion, which give up all of their content at once; the classics seem to grow wiser as we grow wiser, more useful the more we use them. — Sun Tzu

I'm a big fan of Disney's animated movies, or at least of most of them. I don't know what it is, but the songs get stuck in my head. There is a Disney song for every situation you encounter in life. Some people quote The Godfather. Some quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I quote Walt Disney. Those are the true classics. — Judah Smith

And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross crudities of soporific television, of loud brash convertibles and vulgar display- but rather of grace and line and refinement- and there are wonderful and exciting things that only money can buy, such as theater tickets, books, paintings, travel, lovely clothes- and why deny them when one can have them? The only problem is to work, to stay awake mentally and physically, and NEVER become mentally, physically, spiritually flabby or over complacent! — Elizabeth Winder

I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet- and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him- and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity- it would be better to live so than to die right now! Only to live, to live, to live! To live, no matter how- only to live! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. — Herbert Marcuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end. — Richard Strauss

The spiritual life is a gift. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit, who lifts us up into the kingdom of God's love. But to say that being lifted up into the kingdom of love is a divine gift does not mean that we wait passively until the gift is offered to us. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

A classic is read not to enjoy but only to be boast about it. — Aman Jassal

It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote A Passage to India. The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is look at them in a museum of literature, through glass cases. Don't touch! And don't think for a moment that they want to live in the same world as you! And so a lot of adult life
if your hunger and curiosity haven't been squelched by your education
is learning to join up the dots that you didn't even know were there. — Nick Hornby

Want and sickness are too common in many stations of life to deserve more notice than is usually bestowed on the most ordinary vicissitudes of human nature. — Charles Dickens

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much 'catching up' to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life just reading all the classics, or one pretends to be 'contemporary and hip' and never reads any of the classics because in order to pretend to be contemporary one has to at least superficially read the works of contemporaries. Hence the dilemma: one either does not care about being fashionable, or one is fashionable and just learns to mimic some knowledge about the classics. As time develops this rift just becomes bigger, because the amount of books written grows and grows to insane proportions. Conclusion: one can only be hip in the future if one does not read at all, which is a phenomenon I am already witnessing in the media. — Martijn Benders

For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed. — Alan Bennett

A man leaves his great house because he's bored
With life at home, and suddenly returns,
Finding himself no happier abroad.
He rushes off to his villa driving like mad,
You'ld think he's going to a house on fire,
And yawns before he's put his foot inside,
Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion,
Or even rushes back to town again.
So each man flies from himself (vain hope, because
It clings to him the more closely against his will)
And hates himself because he is sick in mind
And does not know the cause of his disease. — Titus Lucretius Carus

He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter. — Marcel Proust

She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe. — Jasper Fforde

Although reading the classics in Latin in school may be not as fulfilling as it would be at a more mature age, few scientists can afford the time for such diversion later in life. — George Andrew Olah

I wish I had done everything on earth with you — F Scott Fitzgerald

There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take. — Stephen King

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

Read the classics one hour every day, drunk or sober. Reading the classics gives one a feeling of confidence. It familiarizes one with the vagaries of life. It shows one that there are really no new plots. — Richard Haynes