Walter Pater Quotes

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Age Art Beauty Books Desire Giving Passion

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Walter Pater

Music, Art, Aspire

Studies in the History of the Renaissance "The School of Giorgione" (1873)

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Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

Walter Pater

Book, World, Vulgarity

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

Walter Pater

Art, Giving, Quality

1873 'Conclusion' in Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

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

Walter Pater

Life, Congratulations, Flames

Studies in the History of the Renaissance "Conclusion" (1873)

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All art constantly aspires to the condition of music....In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other.

Walter Pater

Art, Mean, Expression

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To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life . . . Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end . . . For art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Walter Pater

Art, Flames, Giving

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Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

Walter Pater

Understanding, Experience, Fruit

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance”, p.124, Simon and Schuster

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The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

Walter Pater

Perfection, Way, Disgusting

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Painting”, p.103, Lulu Press, Inc

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

Walter Pater

Views, People, Intellectual

Walter Pater (1873). “Studies in the History of the Renaissance”, p.22

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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

Beauty, Beautiful, Important

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry”, p.2, Courier Corporation

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The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.

Walter Pater

Creativity, Exercise, Imagination

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance”, p.113, Simon and Schuster

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Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

Walter Pater

Special, Quality, Useless

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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

Walter Pater

Walter Horatio Pater (1970). “Letters”

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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; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

Walter Pater

Mother, Rocks, Hands

Studies in the History of the Renaissance "Leonardo da Vinci" (1873)

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Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highestquality toyourmomentsasthey pass,and simply for those moments'sake.

Walter Pater

Art, Passion, Giving

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

Walter Pater

Self, People, Interesting

Walter Pater (2006). “Marius the Epicurean”, p.132, ReadHowYouWant.com

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A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment - and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.

Walter Pater

Weather, Light, Doors

Walter Pater (2010). “The Renaissance: Studies of Art and Poetry”, p.166, The Floating Press

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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

Philosophy, Culture, Spirit

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry”, p.154, Courier Corporation

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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.

Walter Pater

Routine Work, Years, Desire

Walter Pater (2006). “Marius the Epicurean: Easyread Large Edition”, p.233, ReadHowYouWant.com

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To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. ... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.

Walter Pater

Passion, Artist, Flames

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry”, p.154, Courier Corporation

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To higher or lower ends, they [the majority of mankind] move too often with something of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble gait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety to bear grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even great ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and temper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world, at its very sources.

Walter Pater

Moving, Ambition, People

Walter Pater (2011). “The Works of Walter Pater”, p.60, Cambridge University Press

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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.

Walter Pater

Attitude, Sleep, Effort

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry”, p.154, Courier Corporation

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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

Eye, Two, World

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry”, p.154, Courier Corporation

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

Walter Pater

New Beginnings, Science, Forever

Walter Pater, Donald L. Hill (1980). “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry : the 1893 Text”, p.189, Univ of California Press

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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

Beauty, Art, Excellence

Walter Pater (2013). “The Renaissance”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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Born: August 4, 1839
Died: July 30, 1894
Occupation: Critic
Cite this Page: Citation

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