Vernon Lee Quotes

#1. A deal of the world's sound happiness is lost through Shyness.

Vernon Lee

#2. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

Vernon Lee

#3. The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

Vernon Lee

#4. Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers ...

Vernon Lee

#5. What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.

Vernon Lee

#6. 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.

Vernon Lee

#7. Poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.

Vernon Lee

#8. There is too little courtship in the world.

Vernon Lee

#9. Some persons' letters seem almost framed to afford a series of alibis for their personality ...

Vernon Lee

#10. There is no end to the deceits of the past ...

Vernon Lee

#11. 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.

Vernon Lee

#12. Things in this world are very roughly averaged; and although averaging is a useful, rapid way of dispatching business, it does undoubtedly waste a great deal which is too good for wasting.

Vernon Lee