A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value. — 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
