Then I thought of reading — the nice and subtle happiness of reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunishable vice,… - Logan Pearsall Smith

The disconnected impressions which we derive from life form a kind of knowledge ‘in growth,’ as Bacon called it; an over-early and peremptory attempt to digest this knowledge into a system tends, as he suggests, to falsify and distort it.

Few things are more shocking to those who practice the arts of success than the frank description of those arts.

May it [the opposition to fine writing] be accounted for by the fact that the spirit of Puritanism, having been banished from the province of moral conduct, has found a refuge among the arts?