72 Quotes by Walter Pater

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.

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.

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.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

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.

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.

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?