Curated Quotations

Walter Pater

Quotations

  • “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

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” -Walter Pater

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “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.” -Walter Pater

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.” -Walter Pater

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” -Walter Pater

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “In a sense 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

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.” -Walter Pater

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “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

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “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.” -Walter Pater

    (click to view listing)

    –

  • “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” -Walter Pater

    (click to view listing)

    –

View More Quotations – By Author.

View More Quotations – By Topic.

Home.