Walter Pater Short Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Pater
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.

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
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.

Walter Pater
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.

Walter Pater
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