Altered Quote by John Dryden

“The scholiast who annotated Virgil was wrong. Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.”

— Fernando Pessoa

“In his Comedy , Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such…

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

— Mary MacLane

I think there might even come a time when I would read Virgil again. Ovid's Metamorphoses, perhaps, not because the music goes round and…

— William Golding

Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.

— John Dryden

All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes…

— Charles Caleb Colton

There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of…

— Pierre Bayle

Why cannot we be delighted with an author, and even feel a predilection for him, without a dislike of others? An admiration of Catullus…

— Walter Savage Landor

“He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in through the…

— Richard Flanagan

“Homer is universally allowed to have had the greatest Invention of any writer whatever. The praise of judgment Virgil has justly contested with him,…

— Alexander Pope

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a…

— Edward Hirsch

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not…

— Jonathan Swift