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.
When I was growing up, my mother would always say, 'It will go on your permanent record.' There was no 'permanent record.' If there were a 'permanent record,' I'd never be able to be a lawyer. I was such a bum, in elementary school and high school... There is a permanent record today and it's called the Internet.
I love the ideals of my country. But I hate that we've been so denied any real knowledge of the world and don't have the education to think clearly, so we vote against our economic interest and believe in our most shallow first thoughts of fear and hatred.
I entreat masters to live a good life and faithfully to instruct their scholars, especially that they may love God and learn to give themselves to knowledge, in order to promote His honour, the welfare of the state, and their own salvation, but not for the sake of avarice or the praise of man.
Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.
All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection
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