The Harvard Classics in a Year Quotes

“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party;—often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community;—and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils, and modified by mutual interests.—However combinations or associations of the above descriptions may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.—”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues. I rul’d each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I cross’d these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day.”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance”
― Amanda Kennedy, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“When Xanthippe was chiding Socrates for making scanty preparation for entertaining his friends, he answered:—“If they are friends of ours, they will not care for that; if they are not, we shall care nothing for them!” CLXXXII”
― Amanda Kennedy, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyranny and oppression,”
― Amanda Kennedy, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“Note 3. Livres. £ s. d. Travaux de charité pour subvenir au manque de travail à Paris et dans les provinces 3,866,920 — 161,121 13 4 Destruction de vagabondage et de la mendicitéLivres. £ s.d.1,671,417 — 69,642 7 6 Primes pour l’importation de grains 5,671,907 — 236,329 9 2 Depenses relatives aux subsistances, déduction fait des récouvrements qui ont eu lieu”
― Amanda Kennedy, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“Pantheus, Apollo’s priest, a sacred name, Had scap’d the Grecian swords, and pass’d the flame: With relics loaden, to my doors he fled, And by the hand his tender grandson led. ‘What hope, O Pantheus? whither can we run? Where make a stand? and what may yet be done?’ Scarce had I said, when Pantheus, with a groan: ‘Troy is no more, and Ilium was a town! The fatal day, th’ appointed hour, is come, When wrathful Jove’s irrevocable doom Transfers the Trojan state to Grecian hands. The fire consumes the town, the foe commands; And armed hosts, an unexpected force, Break from the bowels of the fatal horse”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“But, on the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it; as those who aim at perfect writing by imitating the engraved copies, tho’ they never reach the wish’d-for excellence of those copies, their hand is mended by the endeavor, and is tolerable while it continues fair and legible.”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“But, on the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it; as those who aim at perfect writing by imitating the engraved copies, tho’ they”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. Judge it afterwards, if you think yourself qualified to do so; but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if the author is worth anything, that you will not get at his meaning all at once;—nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any wise.”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“What wouldst thou be found doing when overtaken by Death? If I might choose, I would be found doing some deed of true humanity, of wide import, beneficent and noble. But if I may not be found engaged in aught so lofty, let me hope at least for this—what none may hinder, what is surely in my power—that I may be found raising up in myself that which had fallen; learning to deal more wisely with the things of sense; working out my own tranquillity, and thus rendering that which is its due to every relation of life….”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“, I am disposed to believe that it is to be found complete in each individual; and on this point to adopt the common opinion of philosophers, who say that the difference of greater and less holds only among theaccidents, and not among the forms or natures of individuals of the same species.”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“Liberal education accomplishes two objects. It produces a liberal frame of mind, and it makes the studious and reflective recipient acquainted with the stream of the world’s thought and feeling, and with the infinitely varied products of the human imagination.”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man.”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“electioneering took place; factions arose; the parties contracted ill-blood; civil wars blazed forth; the lives of the citizens were sacrificed to the pretended happiness of the state; and things at last came to such a pass, as to be ready to relapse into their primitive confusion. The ambition of the principal men induced them to take advantage of these circumstances to perpetuate the hitherto temporary charges in their families; the”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“they would remain sole judges in their own cause, and”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“for magistracy and its rights being built solely on the fundamental laws, as soon as these ceased to exist, the magistrates would cease to be lawful, the people would no longer be bound to obey them, and,”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“to establish slavery it was necessary to do violence to nature, so”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“essential gifts of nature, such as life and liberty,”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“when I see free-born animals through a natural abhorrence of captivity dash their brains out against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of naked savages despise European pleasures and brave hunger, fire and sword, and death itself to preserve their independency; I feel that it belongs not to slaves to argue concerning liberty.”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“know that the first are constantly crying up that peace and tranquillity they enjoy in their irons, and”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“disagreeable yoke of our reason: for almost the only pleasure that men have in judging better than others, consists in a sort of conscious pride and superiority, which arises from thinking rightly; but then, this is an indirect pleasure, a pleasure which does not immediately result from the object which is under contemplation. In”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“in the midst of a community based upon an aristocracy which has outlived the vigor of its prime; surrounded by a Europe containing nothing grand, unless it be Napoleon on one side and Pitt on the other, genius degraded to minister to egotism; intellect bound to the service of the past. No seer exists to foretell the future: belief is extinct; there is only its pretence: prayer is no more; there is only a movement of the lips at a fixed day or hour, for the sake of the family, or what is called the people; love is no more; desire has taken its place; the holy warfare of ideas is abandoned; the conflict is that of interests. The worship of great thoughts has passed away. That which is, raises the tattered banner of some corpse-like traditions; that which would be, hoists only the standard of physical wants, of material appetites: around him are ruins, beyond him the desert; the horizon is a blank. A”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“Human judgment, like Luther’s drunken peasant, when saved from falling on one side, too often topples over on the other. The”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“All the natural powers in man, which I know, that are conversant about external objects, are the senses; the imagination; and the judgment. And”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since,”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“to slight and take no care how what is said is likely to be received by the audience, shows something of an oligarchical temper, and is the course of one that intends force rather than persuasion. Of”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days

“public liberty and prosperity, and”
― Charles Eliot, The Harvard Classics in a Year: A Liberal Education in 365 Days