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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

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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
Seen
Pulses
Given
Counted
May
Pulse
Life
Finest
Dramatic
Senses
Number
Numbers
Variegated

More quotes by Walter Pater

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How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
Walter Pater
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Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
Walter Pater
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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
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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.
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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
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Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Walter Pater
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What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.
Walter Pater
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It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.
Walter Pater
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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
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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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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
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To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Walter Pater
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.
Walter Pater
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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