Skip to content

Walter Pater Quotes

1839–1894 England

Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist and literary critic.

England
Essayists
Journalists
Novelists

Also known as: Pater, Walter

Random Walter Pater quote

12 quotes

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

The Renaissance (1873)

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

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

Marius the Epicurean (1885)

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

The Renaissance (1873)

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

The Renaissance (1873)

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

The Renaissance (1873)

The essential elements ... of the romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty.

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. … Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

The Renaissance (1873)

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.

The Renaissance (1873)

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.

Marius the Epicurean (1885)

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.

Marius the Epicurean (1885)

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.

The Renaissance (1873)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Walter Pater (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.