quotes from classic

 / page 1043 of 1205 /

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.

more quotes from Pater Walter

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.

more quotes from Pater Walter

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.

more quotes from Pater Walter

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

more quotes from Pater Walter

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

more quotes from Pater Walter

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

more quotes from Pater Walter

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

more quotes from Pater Walter

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

more quotes from Pater Walter

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

more quotes from Pater Walter

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.

more quotes from Pater Walter

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

more quotes from Pater Walter

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.

more quotes from Pater Walter

A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to to be seen in them by the finest senses?

more quotes from Pater Walter

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.

more quotes from Pater Walter

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.

more quotes from Pater Walter

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.

more quotes from Pater Walter

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

more quotes from Pater Walter

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

more quotes from Pater Walter

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

more quotes from Pater Walter

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.

more quotes from Pater Walter