Walter Pater Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

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

Walter Pater
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
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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Walter Pater
We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.

Walter Pater
It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.

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

Walter Pater