Quotes by Walter Pater - Page 2

Has nature connected itself together by no bond, allowed itself to be thus crippled, and split into the divine and human elements? Well! there are certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth.
Walter Pater / Critic
Elements
Heaven
Together
Copy Quote
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. ... While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend.
Walter Pater / Critic
Artist
Flames
Passion
Copy Quote
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.
Walter Pater / Critic
Ambition
Moving
People
Copy Quote
Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
Walter Pater / Critic
Quality
Special
Useless
Copy Quote
Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. 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.
Walter Pater / Critic
Attitude
Effort
Gathering
Sleep
Copy Quote
That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.
Walter Pater / Critic
Art
Poetry
Unity
Copy Quote
The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.
Walter Pater / Critic
Imagination
Creativity
Exercise
Copy Quote
It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself.... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few.
Walter Pater / Critic
Death
Religious
Spiritual
Copy Quote
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 molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
Walter Pater / Critic
Hands
Mother
Rocks
Copy Quote

Related Critic Authors

William Irwin Thompson
Critic
Saturday, Jul 16, 1938
William A. Henry Iii
Critic
Saturday, Jan 14, 1950
Tuesday, Jun 28, 1994
Will Cuppy
Critic
Saturday, Aug 23, 1884
Monday, Sep 19, 1949
Walter Pater
Critic
Sunday, Aug 04, 1839
Monday, Jul 30, 1894
Vivian Gornick
Critic
Friday, Jun 14, 1935
Vicki Goldberg
Critic
Tom Shales
Critic
Friday, Nov 03, 1944
Terry Teachout
Critic
Monday, Feb 06, 1956
Stephen Metcalf
Critic
Stephen Bayley
Critic
Saturday, Oct 13, 1951
Scott Ritter
Critic
Saturday, Jul 15, 1961
Samad Behrangi
Critic
Saturday, Jun 24, 1939
Thursday, Aug 31, 1967
S. T. Joshi
Critic
Sunday, Jun 22, 1958
S. S. Van Dine
Critic
Monday, Oct 15, 1888
Tuesday, Apr 11, 1939

View All Critic Quotes

Top Authors

John Keats
Poet
Saturday, Oct 31, 1795
Friday, Feb 23, 1821
Barack Obama
44Th U.s. President
Friday, Aug 04, 1961
Donald Trump
45Th President Of The United States
Friday, Jun 14, 1946
Will Rogers
Actor
Tuesday, Nov 04, 1879
Thursday, Aug 15, 1935
John F. Kennedy
35Th U.s. President
Tuesday, May 29, 1917
Friday, Nov 22, 1963
Socrates
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Vince Lombardi
Football Player
Wednesday, Jun 11, 1913
Thursday, Sep 03, 1970
Chanakya
Teacher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thomas Sowell
Economist
Monday, Jun 30, 1930
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Philosopher
Mother Teresa
Saint
Friday, Aug 26, 1910
Friday, Sep 05, 1997
Aristotle
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Oscar Wilde
Writer
Monday, Oct 16, 1854
Friday, Nov 30, 1900
Billy Graham
Evangelist
Thursday, Nov 07, 1918
Heraclitus
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970

View All Authors

Walter Pater Quotes - Page 2

App & Tools

Related Critic Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

App & Tools

Related Critic Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page