Quotes About Classics

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

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.

I would say it was [ifluence] all the Greeks and the Russian classics like [Lev] Tolstoy, [Andrey] Goncharov,[Fedor] Dostoyevsky, [Alexander] Pushkin, and the international classics in Russian translation like Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain.

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

Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.

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.

Classics can be phenomenal when done right. A simple roast chicken dish could be the best thing you ever eat.

By the Angel, it just crushed Sophocles," noted Will. "Has no one respect for the classics these days?

Mike Tyson has to be one of my greatest all time fighters. Muhammad Ali. I like going back looking at the classics like Roberto Duran. I like the old time fighters, when you had a champion in the old days you really had a true champion. Muhammad Ali would take on anybody. You had the greats fighting everybody.

Look to the Classics, History, to the Arts, for there is truth. Look away from the systems, the processes, the techniques.

Music critics think of lyrics first and don't consider melody but so many songs are lyrically depressing but musically great, and that's why they become classics.

I start each collection thinking how I can refresh my classics.

What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.

Yes, I know, shaming, isn't it? I always say you can take the girl out of the 80s, but you can't take the 80s out of the girl. Before I wrote my first novel, I was reading one of the self-help classics – and it's as cheesy as you like, so feel free to laugh, Guardian readers – called Awaken The Giant Within, by Tony Robbins, and it inspired me to try. I like motivational books, because I like the go-getting American spirit – your destiny is in your own hands, life is what you make it, don't accept your limitations, jump before you're pushed, leap before you look.

I didn't care for most of the books I was being asked to read in school. I started reading like crazy right after high school when I got a job in a mental hospital. I was working my way through college, and I did a lot of night shifts, and there was nothing to do. So I read like crazy, serious stuff, all the classics.

The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)

It amazes me when I talk to people in their early 20s and they've never read the classics, things we read as children. When you don't have knowledge and understanding, then fear rises in you.

The ideas of the classics, so far as living, are our commonplaces. It is the modern books that give us the latest and most profound conceptions. It seems to me rather a lazy makeshift to mumble over the familiar.

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.

One of the challenges in writing the script Call Me by Your Name was that I had to find something concrete for the professor to do. In the book he is some kind of classics scholar. But I thought it would be interesting to make him into something of an art historian and archaeologist whose background was the classical world. It's always difficult when someone is supposed to be an intellectual. What do they do? You can't just film them sitting around and thinking all day. And that's what the business of the statues is all about.

Negative books can be bestsellers, but seldom classics.

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.

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.