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.

Books are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on shelves!

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.

Cartile bune nu sunt doar carti, adica bucati de hartie moarta, ci minti vii asezate pe rafturi.

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.

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.

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)

شخصيتنا وحياتنا الاجتماعية إن هي إلا تغيير مستمر.

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.

are not merely lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.’ Gilbert Highet.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on shelves.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed day and night by electric waves beyond the range of our physical hearing; 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 far distant voice in time and s[ace, and hear it speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.~~Gilbert Highet (quoted in Crossing Open Ground by Barry Lopez)

Books are not merely lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.’ Gilbert Highet.