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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

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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
Art
Awakening
Beautiful
Literary
Rousseau
Book
Sake
Confessions
Love
Wisdom
Describes
Passion
Sixth
Beauty
Confession
Desire
Passages
Sense
Poetic

More quotes by Walter Pater

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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
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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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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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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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Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.
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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It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.
Walter Pater
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To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.
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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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
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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
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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
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All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Walter Pater
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The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts
Walter Pater
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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
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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
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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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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
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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