Walter Pater Quotes

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

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.

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.

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

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.

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.

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.

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.

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?

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads.

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.

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 to ad as a religious object.

A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable.

All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.

It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.

What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.

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 are to have no direct share.

To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions.

To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

With myself, how to pass time becomes sometimes the question - unavoidably, though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad in a life so short as ours.

To burn always with this hard gemlike flame to maintain this ecstasy is success in life.

To burn always with this hard gemlike flame. To maintain this ecstasy is success in life.