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
Walter Pater quotes about
listening men seemed silent
He seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice, silent for other men
life congratulations flames
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
fruit ends
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
perfection way disgusting
The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts
beauty art excellence
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.
italian renaissance ancient
No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.
dramatic-life numbers may
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?
religious art age
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.
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.
moving ambition people
To higher or lower ends, they [the majority of mankind] move too often with something of a sad countenance, with hurried and ignoble gait, becoming, unconsciously, something like thorns, in their anxiety to bear grapes; it being possible for people, in the pursuit of even great ends, to become themselves thin and impoverished in spirit and temper, thus diminishing the sum of perfection in the world, at its very sources.
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?
renaissance century
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.
facts wordsworth natural
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.
moving intellectual age
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.