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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

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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
Shall
Strangeness
Art
Originality
True
Indispensable
Certain
Element
Something
Surprise
Indeed
Elements
Blossoming
Works
Excite

More quotes by Walter Pater

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Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.
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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.
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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.
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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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Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.
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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.
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The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts
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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.
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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.
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Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
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All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.
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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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.
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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.
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To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.
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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