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“Thus it is: added difficulty, added beauty;”
In the specific context of verse technique, Stevenson argues that an additional formal constraint can create another opportunity for artistic achievement and aesthetic interest.
Source note: Essays in the Art of Writing, “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature”; Project Gutenberg #492. “Difficulty” here concerns literary form and craft, not a universal claim that hardship automatically makes things better.
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“We shall never learn the affinities of beauty”
Stevenson treats beauty as deeper than any complete technical explanation, warning that analysis of artistic mechanism does not exhaust why form can move or delight.
Source note: Essays in the Art of Writing, “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature,” represented by the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition in Project Gutenberg #492. The collection is posthumous; the excerpt concerns literary aesthetics.
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“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.”
Dickinson turns reading into a form of travel: language can carry a reader beyond physical limits without requiring wealth, distance, or transportation.
Source note: Poem commonly titled “A Book,” later known by its opening line; first two lines of the poem.
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“He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms.”
The sentence resists a single narrow standard of beauty and asks the critic to remain open to excellence appearing through different periods, types and schools.
Source note: The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398. The following sentences extend the point across periods and schools of taste.
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“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
Thoreau treats reading as potentially transformative: a book can mark a genuine before-and-after point when it gives language to questions a reader has struggled to express.
Source note: Walden, chapter “Reading,” in the discussion of books that can reveal new possibilities and answer enduring questions.
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“All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.”
Some books answer a temporary need while others continue to reward readers across generations; the distinction encourages deliberate choices about what deserves sustained attention.
Source note: Sesame and Lilies; Ruskin distinguishes temporary reading from books whose value endures beyond their immediate moment.