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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
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Walter Pater
Age: 54 †
Born: 1839
Born: August 4
Died: 1894
Died: July 30
Art Critic
Art Historian
Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Professor
Writer
Walter Horatio Pater
First
Thousand
Bury
Upon
Flood
Experience
Sharp
Action
External
Reality
Forms
Form
Calling
Seems
Sight
Importunate
Firsts
Objects
Pressing
More quotes by 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
For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.
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
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
A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to to be seen in them by the finest senses?
Walter Pater
In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.
Walter Pater
What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.
Walter Pater
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Walter Pater
Has nature connected itself together by no bond, allowed itself to be thus crippled, and split into the divine and human elements? Well! there are certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth.
Walter Pater
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
To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions.
Walter Pater
It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.
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
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
The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts
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
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
Walter Pater
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
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
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
