Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Interpretation
Books provide a safe escape from the harshness of reality.
In this quote, Walter Pater emphasizes the protective and comforting nature of books. He suggests that literature serves as a sanctuary, allowing readers to retreat from the harshness and trivialities of everyday life, offering them a space for contemplation and intellectual freedom.
In practice
During a book club meeting to reflect on the comforting power of literature.
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life . . . Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end . . . For art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
Skateistan's not just about skating. Itβs giving people life skills and hope for the future.
So much crap passes as information that not only does the audience sometimes miss the distinction between news and crap, the editors sometimes miss the distinction.
All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.
In order to learn, one must change one's mind.
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
For 300 years, higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core.
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