We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life. — 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 to to be seen in them by the finest senses? — Walter Pater Copy Share
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 forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into… — Walter Pater Copy Share
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 erring habits of life; a physiognomy healthy-looking, cleanly, and firm, which seemed unassociable with any form of self-tormenting, and made one think of the nozzle of some young hound or roe, such as human beings invariably… — Walter Pater Copy Share
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 own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the… — Walter Pater Copy Share
“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
