Walter Pater quotes

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. (Walter Pater)
What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions. View quote
Walter Pater
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass. View quote
Walter Pater
Every intellectual product must be judged from the point-of-view of the age and the people in which it was produced. View quote
Walter Pater
To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people. View quote
Walter Pater
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. View quote
Walter Pater
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed that by what it achieved. View quote
Walter Pater
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, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. View quote
Walter Pater
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. View quote
Walter Pater
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. View quote
Walter Pater
With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. (Walter Pater)
It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art. View quote
Walter Pater
Rousseau ... asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement. View quote
Walter Pater
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 temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. View quote
Walter Pater
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 out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. View quote
Walter Pater
The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. View quote
Walter Pater
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. View quote
Walter Pater
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. View quote
Walter Pater
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. View quote
Walter Pater
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 Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. View quote
Walter Pater
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 comes naturally to many of us. (Walter Pater)
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 important element in the general temper of our modern poetry. View quote
Walter Pater
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 real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. View quote
Walter Pater
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 literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. View quote
Walter Pater
To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. View quote
Walter Pater