GK Chesterton on Classic Literature and Old Books

Reading through my copies of the Quotable Chesterton and More Quotable Chesterton I came across the following quotes which might serve as an apologia for the Library's continued existence.

The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one's last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to be old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone. (The Common Man, p. 22)

You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fact because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well. (The Common Man, p.23)

[Therefore] it does not give the man for whom the old things are stale any right to scorn the man for whom the old things are fresh. And there always are men for whom the old things are fresh. Such men, so far from being behind the times, are altogether above the times. They are too individual and original to be affected by the trivial changes of time. (Illustrated Daily News, October 6, 1928)