Every book from which you can get new interests and ideas is alive, although it was written many
centuries ago. To realize that is to open a broader universe to your own mind. The difference between an educated man and an uneducated man is that the uneducated man lives only for the moment, reading his newspaper and watching the latest moving-picture, while the educated man lives in a far wider present, that vital eternity in which the psalms of David and the plays of Shakespeare, the epistles of Paul and the dialogues of Plato, speak with the same charm and power that made them immortal the instant they were written.
Živa je svaka knjiga kadra da u vama probudi nove interese i nove ideje, makar bila napisana prije mnogo stoljeća. Kad to shvatite, vašem će se umu otvoriti prostraniji svemir. Razlika između obrazovanog i neobrazovanog čovjeka u tome je što neobrazovani žive samo u sadašnjem trenutku, čitajući današnje novine i gledajući najnoviji film, dok je sadašnjost u kojoj žive obrazovani znatno prostranija: ona je živa vječnost u kojoj Davidovi psalmi i Shakespeareove drame, Pavlove poslanice i Platonovi dijalozi govore istom čarolijom i snagom koja ih je učinila besmrtnima čim su bili napisani.
Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (1949)
