Climbing Parnassus Quotes

“History and literature rebuke our self-sufficiency; that's one reason why we ought to study them. It's not so much that people of olden times were the finest exemplars of higher humanity, for they too fell short of their ideals, as must all who aspire to higher things--that's what ideals are for. It's that we have abandoned those ideals once animating our civilization, refusing to learn them anew with each generation. We have assumed their transfer to be automatic. We have not indeed jettisoned the hope and drive that keep us working for a better world (that's the good news), but we have forgotten to cultivate ourselves as individuals.”
― Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin

“The hard, precipitous path of classical education ideally led not to knowledge alone, but to the cultivation of mind and spirit.”
― Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin