#classics

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

He might wish and wish and never get it - the beauty and the loving in the world! ↗

— John Galsworthy

#beauty

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Aeschylus, nor Virgil even, works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equaled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#beauty

Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman. ↗

— Roman Payne

#classics #dreams #greek #heroism #homer

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#dream #reality #dreams

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

#reading #imagination

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

You are going, Jane?" "I am going, sir." "You are leaving me?" "Yes." "You will not come? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My deep love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?" What unutterable pathos was in his voice! How hard was it to reiterate firmly, "I am going!" "Jane!" "Mr. Rochester." "Withdraw then, I consent; but remember, you leave me here in anguish. Go up to your own room, think over all I have said, and, Jane, cast a glance on my sufferings; think of me." He turned away, he threw himself on his face on the sofa. "Oh, Jane! my hope, my love, my life!" broke in anguish from his lips. Then came a deep, strong sob. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#heartbreak #romance #life

But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#romances #russian-literature #life