Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Walter PaterThe Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.
Walter PaterIt is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself.... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few.
Walter Pater