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

— Walter Pater

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Notes from Wikiquote

Quoted in: Bergan Evans, ed., Dictionary of Quotations (1968), p. 597

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More quotes by Walter Pater

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)

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Walter Pater (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.