Home › Authors › Vernon Lee
Vernon Lee Quotes
1856–1935 England
Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the French-born British writer Violet Paget (14 October 1856 – 13 February 1935). She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics.
England Authors Essayists Novelists Short story writers Random Vernon Lee quote
8 quotes
As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking.
Art is the expression of a man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to the universe's unspoken message.
Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895)
There is no end to the deceits of the past; we protest that we know it is cozening us, and it continues to cozen us just as much.
There is an unlucky tendency to allow every new invention to add to life's complications, and every new power to increase life’s hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better.
Hortus Vitae (1904)
Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. We speak of leisure time, but what we really mean thereby is time in which we can feel at leisure. What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.
Having once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed always to have been present in one's consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma.
Let us rather think gently of things, sad, but sad without ignominy, of friendships stillborn or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a place like that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies; often, like them, let us hope, removed to a sphere where such things grow finer and more fruitful, the sphere of the love of those we have not loved enough in life.
Surely the excellence of all poetry — what puts Shelley above Keats, Goethe above Shelley (in his Lyrics), and English, German and Italian Poetry so incomparably above French—surely the great thing is the co-ordination into a total mood, as distinguished from the charm of detached metaphors or descriptions or verses.
Topics Vernon Lee is quoted on
Works