Gilbert Highet > Quotes

“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.”
― Gilbert Highet, The Immortal Profession

“Books are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on shelves!”
― Gilbert Highet

“Vergil preferred to give a few touches, and to allow the imagination of his readers to fill out the picture: that is one reason for his almost universal appeal. He changes each of his readers into a poet or an artist.”
― Gilbert Highet

“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on shelves...far distant in time...speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.”
― Gilbert Highet

“Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)”
― Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature

“Cartile bune nu sunt doar carti, adica bucati de hartie moarta, ci minti vii asezate pe rafturi.”
― Gilbert Highet

“The real duty of man is not to extend his power or multiply his wealth beyond his needs, but to enrich and enjoy his imperishable possession: his soul.”
― Gilbert Highet

“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on shelves.”
― Gilbert Highet

“History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts.”
― Gilbert Highet

“Books are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on shelves”
― Gilbert Highet

“شخصيتنا وحياتنا الاجتماعية إن هي إلا تغيير مستمر.”
― Gilbert Highet, هجرة الأفكار