On psychopathology -

"Only when the concrete details of environment are laid in, as, for instance, in an honest and discerning novel, can the significance of behavior be well appreciated. Certainly no brief case summary and probably no orthodox psychiatric history can succeed in portraying the character and the behavior of [psychopaths] as they appear day after day and year after year in actual life.
    
It is not enough to set down that a certain patient stole his brother's watch or that another got drunk in a poolroom while his incipient bride waited at the altar. To get the feel of the person whose behavior shows disorder, it is necessary to feel something of his surroundings. ... It is all but impossible to demonstrate any of the fundamental symptoms in the psychopath [in the hospital alone]. The substance of the problem, real as it is in life, disappears, or at least escapes our specialized means of perception, when the patient is removed from the milieu in which he is to function."

- Hervey Cleckly, The Mask of Sanity, 1941.

The lunatic fringe of Alexandrian pseudo-science...

"Greek literary studies today may with some justification be compared with a large, thriving, yet still half-unexplored colony. Look at the map. Here are the state highways, confidently marked in red, establishing communications from one boundary to the other: Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plato. These roads, and the towns they serve - Homeric Society, the House of Atreus, Solon's Reforms, the Peloponnesian War, the struggle with Macedonia, the Theory of Ideas - we know and travel over regularly. Then there are the minor roads and less-frequented villages: Theocritus, Apollonius Rhodius, Polybius; Hellenistic culture, Alexandrian epic, Greco-Roman historiography. Finally there is the bush, where tenderfoots never venture at all, but where you may find the old professional diggers staking out their claims: Lycophron, Aeneas Tacticus, Diodorus Siculus, Cercidas, Parthenius, and never-dry watering holes labelled 'Unedited Papyri', 'Scholia', or 'Fragments'. Development, we hear, is going on; but the reports from upcountry are generally in code, and for restricted circulation only .

"This is a curious and not wholly beneficial state of affairs. The classical student's reading list is limited - necessarily limited, perhaps - to certain major authors of proven literary excellence; and he is seldom actively encouraged to forage for himself among minor eccentrics, deadbeat pamphleteers, or the lunatic fringe of Alexandrian pseudo-science. This at once distorts his overall picture of Greek civilization and literature alike. Skimming off the cream makes for indigestion; if there is one thing the Greeks have perenially suffered from, it is the deadening myth of perfection. A wider exploration reassuringly dissolves this illusion. ..."

- Peter Green, "The Humanities Today", 1960.

An irrepressible addendum:

"Mr Thomas Taylor, at the instance, I believe, of the old Duke of Norfolk, printed fifty copies in quarto of a translation of the works of Plato and Aristotle. He did not choose that a larger impression should be struck off, lest these authors should get into the hands of the vulgar. There was no danger of a run in that way. I tried to read some of the Dialogues in the translation of Plato, but, I confess, could make nothing of it: "the logic was so different from ours!" *

*An expression borrowed from a voluble German scholar, who gave this as an excuse for not translating the 'Critique of Pure Reason' into English. He might as well have said seriously, that the Rule of Three in German was different from ours. Mr Taylor (the Platonist, as he was called) was a singular instance of a person in our time believing in the heathen mythology. He had a very beautiful wife. An impudent Frenchman, who came over to London, and lodged in the same house, made love to her, by pretending to worship her as Venus, and so thought to turn the tables on our philosopher. I once spent an evening with this gentleman at George Dyer's chambers, in Clifford's Inn, where there was no exclusion of persons or opinions. I remember he showed with some triumph two of his fingers, which had been bent so that he had lost the use of them, in copying out the manuscripts of Proclus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand. Such are the trophies of human pride! It would be well if our deep studies often produced no other crookedness and deformity! I endeavored (but in vain) to learn something from the heathen philosopher as to Plato's doctrine of abstract ideas being the foundation of particular ones, which I suspect has more truth in it than we moderns are willing to admit. ..."

- William Hazlitt, "On Reading New Books", Florence, May 1825.

"Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C. - he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his - (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) - in no very clerkly hand - legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands - I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S.T.C."

- Charles Lamb, "The Two Races of Men", December 1820. S.T.C. is of course his childhood friend Coleridge.