Walter Pater

Sourced

• It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.
  • Appreciation, Postscript (1889)

The Renaissance (1873)

• Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.
  • Pico Della Mirandola

• Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.
  • On the Mona Lisa, in Leonardo da Vinci

• Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. 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? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
  • Conclusion

• What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.
  • Conclusion

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

Marius the Epicurean (1885)

• A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.
  • Ch. 6

• To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.
  • Ch. 6

• We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life.
  • Ch. 25