Walter Pater said this 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. ”

Famous Quotes of Walter Pater

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

~ Walter Pater

Walter Pater Ecstasy Success

It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

~ Walter Pater

Walter Pater Aesthetics Art Beauty Criticism Epicureanism Philosophy Sense Experience

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.

~ Walter Pater

Walter Pater Art Music

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.

~ Walter Pater

Walter Pater Criticism Essayist Experiential Literature