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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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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
Vital
Point
Forces
Force
Pass
Energy
Number
Always
Numbers
Present
Swiftly
Focus
Purest
Greatest
Unite

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To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
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To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.
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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.
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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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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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All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
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Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common thingsor it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.
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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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The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.
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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.
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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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Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions.
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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