72 Quotes by Walter Pater

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.

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.

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.

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.

He seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring.

The aim of a true achievement must lie, not in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very highest achie

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music, because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; and to it therefore, to the condition of its perf

For him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional, and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.