Gilbert Highet Quotes

Gilbert Arthur Highet was a Scottish-American classicist, academic, writer, intellectual, critic and literary historian.

Born in Scotland, Gilbert Highet is best known as a mid-20th-century teacher of the humanities in the United States. He attended Hillhead High School, Glasgow, Glasgow University and, on both a Snell and a Jenkyns Exhibition, Balliol College, Oxford. His Oxford career was distinguished by a First in Classical Moderations, 1930, an Ireland and Craven Scholarship, 1930, the Chancellor's Prize for Latin Verse, 1931, and a First in Literae Humaniores in 1932. He was appointed a fellow of St John's College, Oxford in 1932 and remained at the college until 1938 when he moved to Columbia University.

He had met his wife, the well-known novelist Helen MacInnes, while they were fellow-students at Glasgow, and they married in 1932. In 1938 he was appointed to the chair of Latin & Greek at Columbia University. He stayed at Columbia until 1971 . He became an American citizen in 1951, following his appointment as Anthon Professor of Latin Language and Literature in 1950. See his obituary in The Times, January 26, 1978.

Highet devoted most of his energy to teaching, but he also aspired to raise the level of mass culture and achieved a broader influence by publishing essays and books, hosting his own radio program, acting as a judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and serving on the editorial board of Horizon magazine.

✵ 22. June 1906 – 20. January 1978

Gilbert Highet: 7 quotes 1 like

Famous 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, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart.”

Gilbert Highet

The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)

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

Gilbert Highet

The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)
Context: 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 by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart.

“Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself.”

Gilbert Highet

The Art of Teaching http://books.google.com/books?id=DogFAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Do+not+try+to+make+the+brilliant+pupil+a+replica+of+yourself%22&pg=PA50#v=onepage (1950)

“The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same. They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people.”

Gilbert Highet

Man's Unconquerable Mind (1954)

“Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, — forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water.”

Gilbert Highet

The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)

“The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning.”

Gilbert Highet

The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)

“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.”

Gilbert Highet

Peoples, Places and Books (1953) http://www.dim.uchile.cl/~anmoreir/varios/byzantium.html

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