Walter Pater Quotes

46 quotes in 772 categories

• Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
• Through the survival of their children, happy parents are able to think calmly, and with a very practical affection, of a world in which they…
• What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.
• In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world,…
• At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us…
• The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts
• Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
• All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,
• Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
• 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…
• A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an…
• And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had…
• Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no…
• Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which…
• 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,…
• No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile…
• What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of…
• 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…
• To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life . . . Not the fruit of experience, but…
• One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the…

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