Quote

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

Walter Pater

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Disgusts
Disgusting
Perfection
Series
Way

More quotes by Walter Pater

Image
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Walter Pater
Image
Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.
Walter Pater
Image
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
Image
Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us - for that moment only.
Walter Pater
Image
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
Image
Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.
Walter Pater
Image
But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.
Walter Pater
Image
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
Image
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
Walter Pater
Image
All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.
Walter Pater
Image
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
Image
What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.
Walter Pater
Image
Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
Walter Pater
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Walter Pater
Image
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
Image
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.
Walter Pater