Top 100 Quotes About Classics
#1. The thing is, what I'm tryin' to say is -
they do get on a lot better without me, I can't help them any. They ain't mean. They buy me everything I want, but it's now - you've-got-it-go-play-with-it. You've got a roomful of things. I-got-you-that-book-so-go-read-it.
Harper Lee
#2. Hell, everybody is a masochist. Some of us are just a little more private.
Cecil Brown
#3. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
Jane Austen
#5. I have seen or heard of no other man whom destiny treated with such enmity as it did Philoktetes
Sophocles
#6. My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That's why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.
Vivienne Westwood
#7. All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.
John Ruskin
#8. If you look back at the great classics and the epics and myths, they were for everyone. Different people got different things from them, but everyone was invited to participate.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#11. Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.
Arthur Machen
#12. I always loved that boy as if he'd been my
my
my own grandfather.
Charles Dickens
#13. The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already.
Mary Stewart
#14. but she studied classics, the most pointless subject in the university.
Natasha Pulley
#15. ... but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.
Homer
#16. Flounder, flounder, in the sea, Come, I pray thee, here to me; For my wife, good Ilsabil, Wills not as I'd have her will.
HarperPerennial Classics
#17. My taste is very eclectic. I love musicals, but I also love the classics. I've seen some fantastic productions. I was in a musical for 600 performances in Australia that I first saw in New York.
Jacki Weaver
#18. Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.
Zora Neale Hurston
#19. Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir
As great in admiration as herself.
William Shakespeare
#20. Elinor ... whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding and coolness of judgment ... her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them.
Jane Austen
#21. Lingerer, my brain is on fire with impatience; and you tarry so long!
Charlotte Bronte
#22. And what does a person with such romantic temperament seek in the study of the classics?
If by romantic you mean solitary and introspective, I think romantics are frequently the best classicists.
Donna Tartt
#23. I like songs that sound like classics. There are songs that might be cooler or have better production, but I like songs that sound like they're timeless.
Alexa Ray Joel
#24. He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly
Leo Tolstoy
#25. Anger was buried far too early in a young heart, which perhaps contained much good.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#26. I've always found that the better the book I'm reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might, someday, become smarter.
Francine Prose
#27. The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
Jon Landau
#28. He had put on the best-looking uniform that he could, thinking that...victory deserved the best-looking armour.
Xenophon
#29. Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur.
If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.
Horace
#30. Some of my favorite songs
and I don't know if this is the right terminology
are white-boy classics.
Shaquille O'Neal
#31. I AM NOT about making movies that would be forgotten. I want to make ONLY timeless classics. I don't care if it takes me ten years
Sahndra Fon Dufe
#32. When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.
Clifton Fadiman
#33. I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.
John Green
#34. This game is lame, the music comes second
So you can save that stupidness for all them artists you checkin.
Popularity don't last long, I'm in it for classics,
Cause the other side of the biz is fake and it's plastic.
Craig G
#35. We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer.
Tade Thompson
#36. I had been tricked once by that Cheat called love, but the Game was over ...
Daniel Defoe
#37. I didn't want to be a catcher. It was thrust upon me, as they say in the classics.
Mickey Cochrane
#38. I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.
Robert Stone
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Do not attempt to hide things which cannot be hidden.
Aesop
#42. ... There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper, irresistible - magic to make the sanest man go mad.
Homer
#43. In art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.
Oscar Wilde
#44. I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.
Tim Blake Nelson
#45. It seemed like an impossible task to do full justice to all Luther classics. And yet these landmark artists have done just that. Memorable performances of wonderful songs that ensure Luther's legacy will live on forever.
Clive Davis
#46. I kinda go for the Jane Eyre type of film. I am fascinated by classics.
Tippi Hedren
#47. Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can't understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn't he have some spark of manhood about him?
James Joyce
#48. The classics tell us that, in relationships, the one between teacher and student comes second only to the one between parent and child.
Lisa See
#49. But she forgot nothing, and he sometimes forgot much too quickly, and, often that same day, encouraged by her composure, would laugh and frolic over the champagne, if friends stopped by. What venom must have been in her eyes at those moments yet he noticed nothing!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#50. The promise, therefore, was given, and must be performed.
Jane Austen
#51. All books are hyggelig, but classics written by authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens have a special place on the bookshelf. At the right age, your kids may also love to cuddle up with you in the hyggekrog and have you read to them. Probably not Tolstoy.
Meik Wiking
#52. I've been recording audiobooks for more than 30 years. I've recorded over 500 titles on all sort of things. I'm a sort of genre-free recording artist - classics and romances, I just finished a sci-fi book, self help ... just all kinds of things.
Barbara Rosenblat
#53. Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart.
E. M. Forster
#54. I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have.
W. Somerset Maugham
#55. Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness - she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.
Homer
#56. 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
#57. Read the great books, gentlemen," Mr. Monte said one day. "Just the great ones. Ignore the others. There's not enough time.
Pat Conroy
#58. When I tour with the new album, I still do the classics, and I love the atmosphere it creates with the whole audience singing along.
Bonnie Tyler
#59. You know, one of the classics when somebody invents something, you go why the hell didn't I think of that.
Anthony Head
#60. I enjoy classics, but classics are classics for a reason.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw
#61. It's all very Greek, isn't it?" I quipped. "Prophecies, tragedies, destinies. Just like in all those old mythology books we read over the years." Fletcher shrugged. "Hard to beat the classics.
Jennifer Estep
#62. 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
#63. There are, I'm depressed to say, many classics I have not yet read and will probably never get around to, though I will not stop short of hospitalizing myself in the attempt.
Glen Duncan
#64. It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#65. Classics stay alive because a great actor or a great director wants to do them.
Scott Rudin
#66. You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you'd run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat - coward!
Homer
#67. In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.
Roger D. Woodard
#68. A classic is a classic for a reason. Let's try to create new classics. The idea of repeating ourselves drives me a little crazy.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#69. I call it an old-fashioned seafood house for the new millennium. We are trying to update what we know as old fish houses and places like that, which are great, but I want to give it a new, fresh look with updated versions of the classics we all love.
Todd English
#70. Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one - so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim - the greater man.
Homer
#71. - Ay! Thornton o' Marlborough Mill, as we call him.
- He is one of the masters you are striving with, is he not? what sort of master is he?
- Did yo' ever see a bulldog? Set a bulldog on hindlegs, and dress him up in coat and breeches, and yo'n just getten John Thornton.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#72. School is very important; it was very important for me. It gave me an enormous amount of confidence, especially at Yale where we were dealing with all the classics. In dealing with the classics, you are dealing with the very best.
Enrico Colantoni
#73. I spent five years, at least, working with Miles. Together, we recorded ESP, Nefertiti, Sorcerer
and I can tell you; each of these albums instantly became jazz classics. Hey, we had Wayne Shorter playing tenor sax, Ron [Carter] on bass, Tony Williams played drums. That was great band we had.
Herbie Hancock
#74. God isn't going to scribble across the sky. The shark is gone.
Peter Benchley
#75. I had a very mixed kind of childhood reading. I read the childhood classics like 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Chums Annual.' At the same time, I read an enormous number of American comics because Shanghai was an American zone of influence.
J.G. Ballard
#76. So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star.
Charles Dickens
#77. 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.
Aloe Blacc
#78. You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard
#79. You learn something from the classics but your feelings and your imagination operate in the domain of the colloquial. We need to think seriously about reforming the Arabic that we use today.
Hassan Blasim
#80. Darwin himself, in his day, was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. It was the classics of Marxism that revealed those errors and pointed them out.
Trofim Lysenko
#81. 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
#82. In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.
Maria Semple
#83. 'Menace II Society' itself was a groundbreaking film. It's definitely going to go in the vaults of classics in all of cinema. The Hughes Brothers created an incredible project. Just gave the world something a little different than what we had seen in previous films in that same genre.
Larenz Tate
#84. Climbers seem to forget that we said in our introduction that there were simply '50 classic routes', not 'the 50 classics'. We chose 50 from a list of about 120. Only a torturer will ever pry loose from our lips the names of those other 70 classics ...
Steve Roper
#85. Usually when I write lyrics I try to read a lot and listen to a lot of other stuff. Some of my favourite lyricists are like Lou Reed, kind of the classics - Bob Dylan and stuff like that.
Andrew VanWyngarden
#86. I suppose I thought your mind would be full of dresses and dances."
"Well, it's not. It's full of Socrates and Euclid.
Leila Rasheed
#88. If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave.
Emily Bronte
#89. But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.
Evelyn Waugh
#90. Even my failures make money and become classics a year after I make them.
Alfred Hitchcock
#91. My favourite designer is Mulberry - their bags are lovely, but their clothes are amazing, I don't think people realise. I love D&G, Fendi, Moschino, Chanel, Armani - all the classics!
Pixie Lott
#92. Pearls' burst out the Snork Maiden excitedly. 'Could ankle rings be made out of pearls?'
'I should think they could,' said Moomintoll. 'Ankle-rings, and nose-rings and ear-rings and engagement rings ...
Tove Jansson
#93. If the spark doesn't come, that's a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.
Italo Calvino
#95. Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old '60s songs. She loves songwriters from the '70s that I hate, like Jim Croce and James Taylor, and she loves Stevie Nicks and old jazz classics.
Denis Leary
#96. Ask not the elves for advice, because they will tell you both 'yes' and 'no'.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#98. 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
#99. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.
Helen Keller
#100. 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
