Walter Pater quotes

Walter Pater was an English essayist, critic, and writer, associated with the Aesthetic Movement. His works explored the relationship between art, beauty, and life, influencing generations of thinkers and artists. He emphasized the importance of individual perception and famously encouraged readers to "burn always with this hard, gemlike flame." Here are 35 of his quotes:

What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.

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

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

Walter Pater

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Walter Pater

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

Walter Pater

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

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

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.

Walter Pater

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

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

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

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

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

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

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

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

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

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

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

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

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