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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.

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More quotes by Vernon Lee

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.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Vernon Lee (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.