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“a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of poetry”
Pater describes demanding reading as training in concentration and inference, where appreciation grows through disciplined attention instead of quick surface consumption.
Source note: Appreciations, essay on Wordsworth; Project Gutenberg #4037. Pater is describing the kind of training he believes Wordsworth can produce in receptive readers.
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“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
Partial knowledge can produce misplaced confidence; the warning favors deeper study over shallow certainty.
Source note: An Essay on Criticism, Part II; Pope warns that shallow learning can produce premature confidence before deeper study tempers judgment.
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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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“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
Bacon distinguishes what reading, conversation, and writing each contribute to intellectual development.
Source note: Of Studies; Bacon distinguishes the intellectual uses of reading, conversation, and writing within the essay’s compact account of study and judgment.
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“all progress of mind consists for the most part in differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into its component aspects”
Pater describes intellectual progress as learning to distinguish parts within what initially seems confused, a method that makes clearer categories and more exact judgment possible.
Source note: Appreciations, essay “Style”; Project Gutenberg #4037. The immediate example concerns distinctions between prose, verse and poetry.
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“Literature is a living art, to be practised.”
The short formulation emphasizes that literary skill develops through use and practice rather than through passive admiration of established works alone.
Source note: On the Art of Writing, Lecture XII, “On Style,” Project Gutenberg #17470; excerpted from Quiller-Couch’s summary of the course.