Walter Pater Quotes

“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.”

“To burn always with this hard, gem-like 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”

“Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.”