Quotes About Classics

I grew up watching the films of 'Carousel' and 'Oklahoma' and 'The Music Man' and 'My Fair Lady' - all the classic musicals of that golden era, The sort of more modern musical theater, or what was modern when I was at a ripe teenage age, I wasn't really listening to that stuff. I was really more raised on the classics.

The 'Classics Illustrated' series was an excellent primer in literature, and I also really enjoyed Zachary Hamby's mythology books for teens.

I never read any fairy tales or classics until I was an adult; all we ever had was comics... No television, either. If we wanted entertainment, we hung around the fish shop.

If you love the language, the greatest thing you can do to ensure its survival is not to complain about bad usage but to pass your enthusiasm to a child. Find a child and read to it often the things you admire, not being afraid to read the classics.

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.

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

We are in need of a second education in order to accustom our eyes to the noble reserve and the quiet grandeur of the classics.

we're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works-- groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless-- have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that traditions had declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of readings with which a book come into our hands) essentially become its first discoverers, an experience as astonishing and unexpected.

Two mountains in Greece, you see: Virgil refers to piling Pelion upon Ossa as a metaphor for adding one very large thing to another—going too far, in other words.

If on a friend's bookshelf You cannot find Joyce or Sterne Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton, You are in danger, face the fact, So kick him first or punch him hard And from him hide behind a curtain.

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.

Ancient texts, he believed, could illuminate customary practices in his own times; conversely, current practices influenced his interpretation of the classics.

What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?" Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child.

There's something nice about out-and-out children's books with no sex and a happy ending—Ransome, Streatfeild, that kind of thing.

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

Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.

I've played the Greek classics; I've played the English classics. I promise you, I'm not complacent, because I hope to be playing all sorts of stuff that I've never played before while the mind - and the body - still functions.

Citesc ca ÅŸi cum m-aÅŸ afla în trecere.Åži tocmai la clasici,la cei calmi,la cei care,dac? sufer?,nu p spun.

At times, parents foist their own choices on kids and try to get them to read the classics. But kids have very high filters and don't take to it. At other times, parents simply don't know what books to select for their children and end up giving books that aren't appropriate.

I like to read first thing in the morning. I'm addicted to the Kindle. I read a lot of business books, because I feel like I should figure out how to be a real businessman before someone figures out that I'm not one. I really enjoy reading classics as well, which I try to work in once every two months.

'Saturday Night Live' is a whole different arena. It's great fun and I love it and that's what we do in the Practical theater. I believe in it wholeheartedly and will do it the rest of my life. But there's also legitimate theater, be it comedy, drama, classics or modern plays which I think is important and something I want to be involved in too.

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity.

There's something cool about playing 'Tempted' and then picking up the mandolin and playing 'Dark as a Dungeon' and standing on the classics. It's nice to just let soul rule.