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.
For among other things he had been counseled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom.
Those who teach by their doctrine must teach by their life, or else they pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.
There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers.
They will not stop me, I will get my education, if it is in home, school or any place
Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
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