Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Paterwas an English essayist, literary and art critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His works on Renaissance subjects were popular but controversial, reflecting his lost belief in Christianity...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth4 August 1839
art english-critic frankly highest proposing simply
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.
begin eager english-critic flame inward
Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring.
achievement aim candid chances complete efforts face futile highest man towards true
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
listening men seemed silent
He seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men
awful desperate effort english-critic experience gathering hardly shall splendour theories time
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.
english-critic expressive human incidental life
For him, indeed, human life is, in the first instance, only an additional, and as it were incidental grace, upon this expressive landscape.
art condition constantly consummate distinct form subject towards
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
views people intellectual
Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.
numbers focus energy
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?
writing poetry difficult
Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
art elements blossoming
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.
knowledge spirit modern
To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions.
play magic mind
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.
change real passion
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.