Quote

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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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.
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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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Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
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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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Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
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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?
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What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.
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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.
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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.
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Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
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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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Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
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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The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts
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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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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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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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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To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.
Walter Pater