Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities.
-Henry David Thoreau
The past is never dead. It's not even past.
-William Faulkner
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress. Men who think and have correct judgment, and people who treat their subject earnestly, are all exceptions only. Vermin is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always at hand and busily engaged in trying to improve in its own way upon the mature deliberations of the thinkers.
-Schopenhauer
1. they have "stood the test of time."
2. If emerging readers stop reading the classics and read only recently written works--no matter how vital and deep those works might be--we lose a continuity with our past and with ourselves. Our present, as a result, becomes a bit more meaningless.
3. “People sometimes ask teachers or critics, ‘Which books should I read to become educated?’ The short answer is either ‘As many as you can’ or ‘A small handful that you study to pieces.’ But a better question might be this one: ‘Which books should I read first?’
“The answer to that is ‘The great patterning works of world literature and culture, the poems and stories that have shaped civilization.’
4. "It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds . . . . In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours." -William Ellery Channing
5. The classics deal with the real questions of life, our deepest concerns: joy, pain, fear, love, hate, courage, anger, death, faith. These issues are reality; they are eternal and more lasting than jobs, careers, school, material things.
6.
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