Classical Texts Quotes

Old Arabic books, printed in Bulaq, generally have a broad margin wherein a separate work, independent of the text, adds gloom to the page.

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

I get letters from college kids who have read Percy Jackson when they were younger who tell me, 'I just passed my Classics exam.' The books are accurate enough that they can serve as a gateway to Homer and Virgil.

In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

Here we are signing autographs for people who essentially know know how to write their name and are functionally literate. But if you cease to teach cursive writing, how does one know how to, I don’t know, replicate the Declaration of Independence? Or the orations of Cicero? Is it just going to be on the internet?

I've been a faithful reader of the great classical documents of economics, or tried to be.

My approach is not a scientific approach. For that, we have greater minds than mine. My approach is: I am in the possession of a text, it has survived so many centuries, and it is my task, my pleasure, to try to decipher it and find all the things that have been said about these few words by generations and generations of commentators. That is what I'm doing. I don't innovate anything. I'm just repeating.

The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but thet are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought