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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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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
Legitimate
Another
Alike
Form
Literary
Truth
Stupidity
School
Schools
Substance
Successive
Dead
Vulgarity
Age
Contention

More quotes by 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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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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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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The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads.
Walter Pater
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The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts
Walter Pater
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A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.
Walter Pater
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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
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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
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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
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All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Walter Pater
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Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.
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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To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions.
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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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 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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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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Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
Walter Pater
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All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.
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.
Walter Pater