Bring those Loeb Classical Library books off the shelf...and read them!

Harvard remembers the Classics, liberal arts

selections from the article:

Indeed, one of the most moving things in Petrarch’s life and work is his sense of the precious rarity of good books—the opposite of our own postmodern sense of literature’s crushing abundance...“I am possessed by one insatiable passion, which I cannot restrain—nor would I if I could...I cannot get enough books,” he wrote to a relative in 1346.

...Italian Renaissance humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio: “We call those studies liberal, then, which are worthy of a free [liber] man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.”

Petrarch offered a warning, often forgotten:

And although Petrarch was himself one of the most learned men of his day, he maintains that he would rather be known as a good Christian than as a great classicist: “If You choose to grant me nothing else,” he prays, “let it at least be my portion to be a good man. This I cannot be unless I greatly love and devoutly worship You. I was born for this, and not for learning. If learning alone is granted us, it puffs up and ruins, and does not edify. It becomes a gleaming shackle of the soul, a wearisome pursuit, and a noisy burden.”