Classical Education Quotes

“Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning

“No, no," Mr. Darling always said, "I am responsible for it all. I, George Darling, did it. MEA CULPA, MEA CULPA."

He had had a classical education.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“We are not reading books merely to check off a list or to be able to say we have read them. We are reading to grow as persons, to know more that we may understand more, and ultimately, it is to be hoped, to act according to our greater wisdom.”
― Karen Glass

“The world is a fabric woven of mysteries, and a mystery is a provocation to our humanity that cannot be dissolved by googling a few more bits of information.”
― Stratford Caldecott

“I had artistic classical training, and when you learn the classics for so many years, you might gain audacity, power and confidence to subvert everything. I am like the originals buffoons. I love the rules because I can break them.”
― Nuno Roque

“If a free people is going to be reproduced, it will require watering and revivifying and owning anew older traditions and awaking the curiosity in the soul of each citizen. National greatness will not be recovered via a mindless expansion of bureaucratized schooling. Seventy years ago, Dorothy Sayers wrote, 'Sure, we demand another grant of money, we postpone the school leaving age and plan to build bigger and better schools. We demand that teachers further slave conscientiously in and out of school hours. But to what end? I believe,' Sayers lamented, 'all this devoted effort is largely frustrated because we have no definable goal for each child to become a fully formed adult. We have lost the tools of learning, sacrificing them to the piecemeal, subject matter approach of bureaucratized schooling that finally compromises to produce passive rather than active emerging adults. But our kids are not commodities, they are plants. They require a protected environment, and care, and feeding, but most basically, an internal yearning to grow toward the sunlight. What we need is the equipping of each child with those lost tools.”
― Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance

“Nowadays it seems you learn only what is reasonable
and relevant. I went to Rome with a young
friend, educated on the latest lines, and who
had taken historical honours at Cambridge.
The first morning the pats of butter came
up stamped with the Twins. “ Good old
Romulus and Remus,” said I. “ Good old
who? ” said she. She had never heard of
the Twins and was much bored when I told
her the story; they had no place in “ con¬
stitutional history ”, and for her the old wolf
of the Capitol howled in vain: “ Great God!
I’d rather be ”!”
― Jane Ellen Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student's Life

“Chinese culture had boys memorize the Dao for centuries. Many cultures commit their sacred, foundational texts to memory.... When you read a hundred words a hundred times they get woven into your soul.... Understanding is not as important. When we struggle with a text, it changes us. Why put things in memory? ... We memorize to contemplate, not to show off.”
― Andrew Kern

“One of the goals of classical education is to discern the appropriate manner by which the mistreated and oppressed can challenge their oppressors without destroying their civilization.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America

“In Acts 14:1, we are told, "At Iconium Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue. There they spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Gentiles believed." This is what should be sought in Christian schools, not just teaching, but effective teaching. Christian content alone is insufficient. It must be presented in a certain way, and that way cannot be reduced to technique. Nevertheless, God has graciously made it possible to bring people the truth by how the truth is presented.”
― Douglas Wilson, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning

“Man may not be the colossus some secular spirits would have him be, armed with the strength and wisdom of the gods, but he has partaken of ambrosia. He has squinted trough the veil and seen just enough of divinity to measure himself by it. The Humanist knows both the strengths and the frailties of man. He strives. But he knows the bounds of his striving.......

Visions and ideals need a path, a way, a roadmap people can use as to arrive at those better, more permanent things that the wise are always seeing dimly whenever they strained their eyes. So man turned a mirror on himself, looked soberly, and-one day-began to write accounts of the discoveries made on the grandest odyssey of them all: the journey to the core of the human mind and soul. The grateful among us read them.”
― Tracy Lee Simmons

“A rhetorician is capable of speaking effectively against all comers, whatever the issue, and can consequently be more persuasive in front of crowds about… anything he likes.”
― Plato, Gorgias

“Classics is a subject that exists in that gap between us and the word of the Greeks and Romans. The questions raised by Classics are the questions raised by our distance from 'their' world, and at the same time by our closeness to it, and its familiarity to us. In our museums, in our literature, languages, culture, and ways of thinking. The aim of Classics is not only to discover or uncover the ancient world (though that is part of it, as the rediscovery of Bassae, or the excavation of the furthest outposts of the Roman empire on the Scottish borders, shows). Its aim is to also define and debate our relationship to that world.”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“nous laissons à nos sympathies historiques le pas sur notre jugement esthétique. Et ce n'est que lorsqu'il gît tranquillement dans la tombe que nous offrons à un artiste les fleurs de notre approbation.”
― Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea

“Mathematics is the language of science-- but it is also the hidden structure behind art… and its basis is the invisible Logos of God.”
― Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth's Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education

“We have looked at three things that will never appear on a transcript, and yet are vital to the classical tradition of education. First, the primary purpose of education is wisdom and virtue, and every part of the program should serve to teach learners how to think and act rightly. Second, humility is vital to the pursuit of virtue because it keeps us teachable. Third, our approach to knowledge should be relational, synthetic, so that we develop a foundational understanding of the unity of knowledge and our own place in the universe.”
― Karen Glass, Classical Considerations: Charlotte Mason's Links to the Classical Tradition

“To be free, one must have the critical-thinking skills that inoculate against the alluring rhetoric that pervades contemporary society, rhetoric that is constantly seeking to undermine freedom for the sake of varied narrow interests. It is an old story, and Daniel Scoggin, the CEO of Great Hearts, recognizes this reality when he reminds his constituency that "each generation must earn its freedom anew".”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America

“We have no use for ablative absolutes in the Navy.”
― Forester C. S., Mr. Midshipman Hornblower

“A part of the answer to these questions is that Christians have no more moral duty to read and study Greek and Roman literature than ancient Israelites had a duty to study the myths of Baal and Asteroth. Nor should Christian homeschoolers think that they can have a good Christian education only if the "classics" are prominent in the curriculum. The goal of Christian education is to train a child to be faithful in serving God and His kingdom in a calling, and certainly this goal can be achieved by a student who never cracks the cover of a Homeric epic. page 18”
― Peter J. Leithart, Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature, Christian History Literature Book on Reading Pagan Classics, Biblical Books

“I do see Christ everywhere and in everything, as the One in Whom all things, including Western literature, consist. Shakespeare's plays are among the "all things" that Paul says are created "for Christ" (col. 1:16-17). If there is offense in taking Paul quite literally and pressing his global affirmation into crannies of the academy that would rather not hear from an apostle, it is an offense for which I cannot apologize. Pressing Paul's point is a straightforward and unavoidable demand of discipleship. (page 28)”
― Peter J. Leithart, Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature, Christian History Literature Book on Reading Pagan Classics, Biblical Books

“I believe we find imaginative satisfaction in stories that end with weddings because we live in a world that will end with a wedding. The Bible tells the story of history, a story that is so mysteriously "built into" the structures of our minds and practices, so that even writers who resist this story cannot help but leave traces of it -- faint and distorted as they may be -- on every page. (Leithart 30)”
― Peter J. Leithart, Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature, Christian History Literature Book on Reading Pagan Classics, Biblical Books