“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: poetry
Tags: poetry, Walter Pater
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: music
Tags: music, Walter Pater
“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: beauty
Tags: beauty, Walter Pater
“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: poetry
Tags: poetry, Walter Pater
“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: beauty
Tags: beauty, Walter Pater
“Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: experience
Tags: experience, Walter Pater
“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: beauty
Tags: beauty, Walter Pater
“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: attitude
Tags: attitude, Walter Pater
“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: experience
Tags: experience, Walter Pater
“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: beauty
Tags: beauty, Walter Pater
“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.”
— Walter Pater
Author: Walter Pater
Category: poetry
Tags: poetry, Walter Pater