Quotes About Classics

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics.

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.

So pathetic," he said, with a grunt. "So sad. Such a cliche. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing out a classic scene, you don't feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel...pathetic.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

The great thing about university is that they incline you to get up and do it, from the Classics to modern plays, to the humor that Monty Pythons made popular.

Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.

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.

The American classicist Edith Hamilton once described the great works of literature, the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.

Edith Hamilton

I had never seen the classics with Molly Ringwald, like 'Pretty in Pink' or 'Sixteen Candles,' or '80s horror, like 'Poltergeist,' 'Close Encounters,' and 'Nightmare on Elm Street.' I went back and watched all of those.

I loved old movies as a kid, so I always watched old movies.

Hallmark makes beautiful films that feel as if they should be watched in a theater. The Hall family knows the power of stories, and they give us unforgettable movies with heart and depth and the resonance of classics.

I love film. I've always been enchanted by doing film. It's something I grew up watching - classics and directors I admire - so that's something I've always been passionate about.

I played Hamlet, I played Chekhov and Ibsen and all the classics.

And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

I wanted to be a serious actress and do all the classics.

My father didn't do a lot of direct education. My mother was the direct educator. She would put on these movies on American Movie Classics when we got cable, after my parents got divorced, which took like four or five years.

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

I enjoy classics, but classics are classics for a reason. I prefer to focus on the future. There are a lot of new stories to be heard.

There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.

We don't teach kids how to think anymore. We're getting rid of the classics - high school is all about self-esteem.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor in classics like Shaw and Shakespeare and Chekov and Ibsen.