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Walter Pater Quotes

Walter Horatio Pater was 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. Wikipedia  

✵ 4. August 1839 – 30. July 1894   •   Other names Walter Horatio Pater
Walter Pater photo
Walter Pater: 11   quotes 1   like

Famous Walter Pater Quotes

“To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.”

Walter Pater

Source: Marius the Epicurean http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8mrs110.txt (1885), Ch. 6

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

Walter Pater

Conclusion
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)
Context: Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. 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? 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. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

“Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.”

Walter Pater

Pico Della Mirandola
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

“A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.”

Walter Pater

Source: Marius the Epicurean http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8mrs110.txt (1885), Ch. 6

“It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.”

Walter Pater

Appreciation, Postscript (1889)

“We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life.”

Walter Pater

Source: Marius the Epicurean http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8mrs110.txt (1885), Ch. 25

“What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.”

Walter Pater

Conclusion
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

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

Walter Pater

Conclusion
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

Walter Pater Quotes about life

“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. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

Walter Pater

Conclusion
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)
Context: Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. 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? 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. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

“Rousseau … asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement.”

Walter Pater

Conclusion
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.”

Walter Pater

On the Mona Lisa, in Leonardo da Vinci
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

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