#classics

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the ceremony known as afternoon tea ↗

— Henry James

#classics #edwardian #life

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#love #life

Prophet may you be! If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, when time is old and hath forgot itself, when waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy, and blind oblivion swallowed cities up, and mighty states characterless are grated to dusty nothing, yet let memory, from false to false, among false maids in love, upbraid my falsehood! ↗

— William Shakespeare

#ozymandias #vows #love

Jonah-John-if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still-not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places, at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#literature #science-fiction #motivational

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#literature #men

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#men

I’ve heard that lawyers’ children, on seeing their parents in court in the heat of argument, get the wrong idea: they think opposing counsel to be the personal enemies of their parents, they suffer agonies, and are surprised to see them often go out arm-in-arm with their tormenters during the first recess. This was not true of Jem and me. We acquired no traumas from watching our father win or lose. I’m sorry that I can’t provide any drama in this respect; if I did, it would not be true. We could tell, however, when debate became more acrimonious than professional, but this was from watching lawyers other than our father. I never heard Atticus raise his voice in my life, except to a deaf witness. ↗

— Harper Lee

#respect

I have always admired the work of Phil Farmer and was glad for the chance to work with him. Readers today may be too young to remember his classics like The Lovers. ↗

— Piers Anthony

#always #chance #classics #farmer #glad

She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging Young Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her -- she was only an Object of Contempt ↗

— Jane Austen

#humour #sensibility #love

Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born. ↗

— Homer

#death #fate #greece #grief #wisdom