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Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.
--
English Traits (1856).

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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For a thousand years, the Bible was almost the only book people read, if they could read at all. The stories that were officially told and portrayed were Biblical and religious stories. That other fount of Western civilization as we know it today — the Greek classics — went largely unknown until the Renaissance. For our purposes, there's a noteworthy difference between these two literatures: in the Bible people are hardly ever said to be mad as such, whereas in Greek drama they go off their rockers with alarming frequency. It was the rediscovery of the classics that stimulated the long procession of literary madpeople of the past four hundred years.

 

Margaret Atwood

 

Bruce Barton's advertising career started quite accidentally. One of Collier's clients, the Harvard Classics "Dr. Elliot's Five-Foot Shelf of Books," had traditionally been sold on double page spreads. At the last minute, the pressroom man told Barton that he had an extra quarter page left to fill. Barton tore a page out of one of the classics, and asked his readers , "This is Marie Antoinette riding to her death. Have you ever read her tragic story?" Barton had created a unique benefit for his readers — cultural enrichment in less than fifteen minutes a day — and this simple idea sold over 400,000 sets of the classics.

 

Bruce Fairchild Barton

 

In science, read, by preference the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classics are always modern.

 

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

 

Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings
From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods,
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things;
Clothing the vast with a familiar face;
Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race.

 

George William Russell

 

The eighteenth-century polymath Thomas Young was the last person to have read all the books published in his lifetime. That means that he would've read all the Shakespeare and all the Greek and Roman classics and all the theology and all the philosophy and all the science. But the same man today, a man who had read all the books published today, would've had to've read all Dan Brown's novels, two volumes of Chris Moyles' autobiography, The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson II by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson III by Jeremy Clarkson... his mind would be awash with bad metaphors and unsustainable, reactionary opinion; one long anecdote about the time that Comedy Dave put pound coins in the urinal. In short, the man who had read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who had read nothing. That's not a good state of affairs.

 

Stewart Lee