Daily Inspiration Quote by Erich Segal

There is a sly double move in Segal's line: he flatters classicists while quietly calling out the culture that needs them to be flattered. By specifying "not even a professor of English" he draws a sharp status boundary inside the humanities, reminding us that academic prestige has its own caste system. English may be nearer to everyday speech and national identity, but classics gets to claim antiquity, difficulty, and the aura of gatekept knowledge. Segal knows exactly how that sounds, and he leans into it: "something sacred" lands as both admiration and diagnosis.

The priest comparison does the real work. A priest doesn't just know texts; he mediates them. He translates a revered language, guards the ritual, and confers legitimacy on those who can participate. That is the subtext here: classics isn't merely an area of study but an institution that authorizes a certain kind of cultural inheritance. It's about proximity to origins, to "the source", which modern disciplines can only cite secondhand.

Context matters because Segal straddled two worlds: a successful popular novelist (Love Story) and a trained classicist. He'd seen how the broader culture romanticizes the classics as high civilization while also treating the humanities as ornamental. The line captures that tension: reverence tinged with irony, affection edged with skepticism about why we keep needing priests at all.