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Of the Mona Lisa:
Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come', and the eyelids are a little weary.
Walter Pater
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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 on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. 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.
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To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
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She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.
Of the Mona Lisa
Walter Pater
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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.
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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.
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To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.
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What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.
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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.
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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.
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We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.
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It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.
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It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Walter Pater
Creative Commons
Born:
August 4, 1839
Died:
July 30, 1894
(aged 54)
Bio:
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, literary and art critic, and writer of fiction.
Known for:
The renaissance (1877)
Marius the Epicurean (1885)
Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)
Imaginary portraits (1887)
Plato and Platonism
Most used words:
art
life
experience
beauty
sense
point
Walter Pater on Wikipedia
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