Quotes by Walter Pater, page 2

Walter Pater - english critic

Life period: 1839 - 1894

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring.

WQuote by Walter Pater about world, thinking

Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.

WQuote by Walter Pater about education

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

WQuote by Walter Pater about idea, criticism, help

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.

WQuote by Walter Pater about life, objects, poetry, common sense, sense

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

WQuote by Walter Pater about philosophy, culture, human imperfections, spirit, life

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.

WQuote by Walter Pater about activity, culture, age, olderness

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

WQuote by Walter Pater about success, life

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.

WQuote by Walter Pater about things, thinking

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

WQuote by Walter Pater about objects, literary critic, beauty, power, being

What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own.

WQuote by Walter Pater about wish

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.

WQuote by Walter Pater about experience, common sense, sense, things, time