Books and Culture

The beauty of form, the varied and vital aspects of religious, social, and individual character, the splendour and charm of a nobly ordered art in temples, speech, manners, and dress, the constant suggestion of the deep humanism behind that art and of the freshness and reality of all its forms of expression,—these things are as much and as great a part of the "Dialogues" as the thought; and they are full of that quality which enriches and ripens the mind that comes under their influence. In these qualities of his style, quite as much as in his ideas, is to be found the real Plato, the great artist, who refused to consider philosophy as an abstract creation of the mind, existing, so far as man is concerned, apart from the mind which formulates it, but who saw life in its totality and made thought luminous and real by disclosing it at all points against the background of the life, the nature, and the habits of the thinker. This is the method of culture as distinguished from that of scholarship;

t makes very little difference what you study, but that it is in the highest degree important with whom you study

This contact with the richest personalities the world has produced is one of the deepest sources of culture; for nothing is more truly educative than association with persons of the highest intelligence and power.

For what I got that enriched me and prepared me for real comprehension of one of the greatest works of art in all literature was not information, but atmosphere.

I knew other men of greater force and of larger scholarship; but no one else gave me such an impression of balance, ripeness, and fineness of quality.

he has felt afresh the supreme interest

the books that deal with life at firsthand.

there is a philosophy or interpretation of life. Each of these poems is a revelation of what man is and of what his life means; and it is this deep truth, or set of truths, at the heart of these works which we are always striving to reach and make clear to ourselves.

they are not to be read once and put on the upper shelves of the library among those classics which establish one's claim to good intellectual standing, but which silently gather the dust of isolation and solitude; they are to be always at hand.

In like manner, though in lesser degree, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," the "Divine Comedy," the plays of Shakespeare, and "Faust" have set new movements in motion and have enriched and enlarged the lives of races