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“All good Literature rests primarily on insight.”
Lewes makes clear perception the starting condition of literary creation: a writer must see or understand something distinctly before expression can make it vivid.
Source note: The Principles of Success in Literature, Chapter II, “The Principle of Vision,” Project Gutenberg #10420; the 1891 volume was edited by Fred Newton Scott.
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“To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible”
Pater begins aesthetic criticism by preferring close attention to particular works and experiences over a universal formula, making discrimination and concrete observation central to judgment.
Source note: The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398, represented sixth-edition text. The phrase introduces Pater’s method of aesthetic criticism.
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“Use the active voice.”
The rule favors direct sentence construction when it makes agency clearer, while the surrounding discussion still allows passive voice when context requires it.
Source note: The Elements of Style, Chapter III, Rule 10, Project Gutenberg #37134; Strunk immediately qualifies the rule by noting legitimate uses of passive construction.
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“Put statements in positive form.”
Strunk recommends stating what is true or intended directly when possible instead of making the reader reconstruct the point from repeated negation.
Source note: The Elements of Style, Chapter III, Rule 11, Project Gutenberg #37134; the rule concerns sentence construction, not positive-thinking philosophy.
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“Without clear Vision no skill can avail.”
Technique cannot fully rescue confused conception: Lewes argues that literary skill depends first on seeing the subject and its relations with enough distinctness.
Source note: The Principles of Success in Literature, chapter on Vision in Art, Project Gutenberg #10420; “Vision” is Lewes’s critical term for distinct mental apprehension.
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“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
Blake’s proverb compresses a recurring imaginative pattern: possibilities can exist first as conceived ideas before later work, discovery or demonstration makes some of them real or provable.
Source note: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell,” represented by Project Gutenberg #45315 at printed page 16. Gutenberg regularizes the line to “imagined”; Blake’s engraved text is often transcribed with historical spelling and punctuation. The proverb is part of Blake’s deliberately paradoxical infernal-wisdom sequence, not a literal claim that every imagined thing will eventually be proved.