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. Walter Pater Read Quote
With myself, how to pass time becomes sometimes the question – unavoidably, though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad in a life so short as ours. Walter Pater Read Quote
Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Walter Pater Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Walter Pater Read Quote
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. Walter Pater Read Quote
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. Walter Pater Read Quote
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. Walter Pater Read Quote
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. Walter Pater Read Quote
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved. Walter Pater Read Quote
