The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization Quotes

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Growing up loving the Bible made me apt to love other books. I don't love them in the same way I love the Bible, but a lesser love came easily. The splendor of sunlight does not take away

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

For Aristotle, it's not enough simply to act in accordance with the reason once in a while. We must cultivate habits of virtue that develop into a firmly established moral character over a lifetime.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

while modernity is not Christianity, modernity is the product of a Christian civilization. Lately the defects of modernity have been made plain to us while its virtues have been taken for granted.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

By reading older books we get a taste of the conversation of Heaven.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

God bestows great gifts on human beings with perfect justice, but not All gifts we are given come from God. Some gifts come from society or culture, and it is here that problems develop.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

The Romans were a strong power before Virgil, but the Greeks had captured their imaginations. While Rome conquered physical Greece, Greek mythology had enveloped Rome. The Empire coul be confident in itself until a Roman poet matched Homer and harmon...

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

Here (in Thomas Aquinas) is the mind that prepared the way for the scientific and industrial revolutions. Here is the mind that was Catholic enough to embrace any good idea, from wherever it came.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

Austen knew nothing of our modern quest for equality. People are not numbers, and so they are never “equal.” Some folk are higher placed than others, have more money, were more fortunate in their parents, or are brighter. These gifts do not come ...

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

Chaucer, like Homer, writes about a journey, but as a Christian he has a different goal. Homer wanted to go home, but Chaucer's pilgrims want a place of man's true home: paradise

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

Try to get inside the world of Homer and see what it would be like to think with his view of reality. Only then can you begin to judge it, because only then do you really understand it.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

If Christianity is true, then every argument will, if pursued to the end, lead to Jesus.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

Erasmus’s Bible-saturated mind. His was a mind too broad for fundamentalism, which rejects reason, and too honest for intellectualism, which rejects revelation.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

Modernity gone wrong has isolated humanity and made human reason autonomous of (and dismissive toward) revelation.

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

Every nation needs more people who love liberty, fear mob rule, and hate tyranny with the consistent logic and passion of Alexis de Tocqueville. He is still quoted by presidential candidates, but too often he’s ignored by presidents, and therein li...

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

Tolstoy does not tell us how things look to the author; he tells us how they look to the characters. In short, he does not use simile and metaphor. (That astonishing assertion in Wood’s review is what got me started reading Tolstoy in the first pla...

The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization