#classics

Then said he, ’I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.’.... So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side. ↗

— John Bunyan

#classics #literature #courage

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

#cowardice #death #greece #war #death

…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives. ↗

— Homer

#death #greece #death

If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise. ↗

— George Orwell

#classics #drama #interpretation #shakespeare #art

She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#art

If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave. ↗

— Emily Brontë

#love #obsession #love

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

— Cassandra Clare

#will #respect

Countless words count less than the silent balance between yin and yang ↗

— Lao Tzu

#classics #tao-te-ching #balance

Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. ↗

— Mark Twain

#europe #traveling #voyage #men

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art. ↗

— Russell Banks

#american #art #classics #early #early age