Quotes on Reading Classic Literature

"...the best argument for the classics is the classics themselves. If the great classics of Western imagination and ideas are really what we believe them to be - and what they have shown themselves to be - they have their own authority and speak best for themselves."
~Os Guinness


"...we all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books...The only palliative is to keep the clean breeze of the centuries blowing through out minds, and this can be done only by reading old books."
~CS Lewis


"In a time when our current culture is increasingly secular in its aims, one of the most important resources Christians possess is this large treasure trove of works that have already been assimilated by readers and commentators in the nearly two thousand years of Western Christendom."
~Loise Cowen


"It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones."
~CS Lewis


"In a word, our whole civilization, our freedom, our progress, our homes, our religion, rest solidly upon ideals for their foundation. Nothing but an ideal ever endures upon earth. It is therefore impossible to overestimate the practical importance of literature, which preserves these ideals from fathers to sons, while men, cities, governments, civilizations, vanish from the face of the earth."
~William Long


"Great Literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
~Ezra Pound


"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
~Barbara W. Tuchman


"While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living."
~Cyril Connolly