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“Sweet is the lore which Nature brings.”
Nature is presented as a source of knowledge that can complement formal study by training attention and receptiveness.
Source note: The Tables Turned; the line follows Wordsworth’s claim that a vernal wood can teach moral insight.
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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 such thing as a moral or an immoral book.”
Voice: Authorial / signed preface voice · Oscar Wilde — Preface
Wilde shifts judgment away from a book’s supposed moral category and toward artistic execution, a deliberately provocative defense of aesthetic criticism.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Preface; one of Wilde’s epigrams about art and books.
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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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“Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
Voice: Authorial / signed preface voice · Oscar Wilde — Preface
The clipped conclusion makes Wilde’s aesthetic argument memorable by reducing a complicated moral debate to the quality of the writing itself.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Preface; immediately follows the statement rejecting moral and immoral categories for books.