Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible,… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions. — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
“The younger, certainly, had to the full that charm of a constitutional freshness of aspect which may defy for a long time extravagant or… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
“art is self-sufficient and need serve no moral or political purpose” — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
“The essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of… — Walter Pater Copy Share Image
