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.
Quote by Walter Pater about numbers, life
Quotes by Walter Pater
31 quotes by Walter Pater
Walter Pater - english critic
Life period: 1839 - 1894
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.
Quote by Walter Pater about family, poetry, common sense, sense, things
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Quote by Walter Pater about art, music, magic
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.
Quote by Walter Pater about age, art, magic, olderness
Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the conspicuous places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are...
Quote by Walter Pater about art, philosophy, action, pleasure, poetry, life, magic, world
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
Quote by Walter Pater about art, quality, magic, nothing
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.
Quote by Walter Pater about experience, objects, reality, action
Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative, and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness.
Quote by Walter Pater about beauty, experience, human imperfections
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.
Quote by Walter Pater about experience, personality, voice, real estate
For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.
Quote by Walter Pater about art, quality, magic, nothing
For him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional, and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.
Quote by Walter Pater about opinion, grace, human imperfections, life
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.
Quote by Walter Pater about pasion, activity, sadness, common sense, sense, love, life
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. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in...
Quote by Walter Pater about concentration, force, present, numbers, life
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.
Quote by Walter Pater about absent, habits, people, failure, common sense, sense, things, world
Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn.
Quote by Walter Pater about opinion, force, action
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.
Quote by Walter Pater about writers, poetry, beauty, art, magic
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
Quote by Walter Pater about experience, end
Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.
Quote by Walter Pater about gifts, attitude, sleep, sun, moment, day
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...
Quote by Walter Pater about beauty, literary critic, common sense, sense, wisdom, art, magic, love
