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Walter Pater - From the Accidents category:
A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment - and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Art category:
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Beauty category:
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. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Books category:
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)
Walter Pater - From the Change category:
Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us - for that moment only. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Critics category:
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. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Culture category:
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. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Experience category:
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Experience category:
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. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Exploration category:
What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Fashion category:
- b.1839 - d.1894...
To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Fire category:
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Greatness category:
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed than by what it achieved. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Habit category:
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. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Impressionism category:
- b.1839 - d.1894...
But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Interest category:
To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Knowledge category:
To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Music category:
All art aspires to the condition of music. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Mysteries category:
It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Observation category:
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. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Originality category:
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. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Passion category:
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)
Walter Pater - From the Philosophy category:
Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Poetry category:
-to Richard Wollheim...
Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Poetry category:
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. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Questions category:
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? (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Religion category:
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 add as a religious object. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Searching category:
- on Anthony Watteau...
He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all. (Walter Pater)
Walter Pater - From the Senses category:
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)
Walter Pater - From the Theory category:
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)
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