List of Walter Pater Quotes

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.

Has Nature Connected Itself Together By No Bond, Allowed Itself To Be Thus Crippled, And Split Into The Divine And Human Elements? Well! There Are Certain Divine Powers Of A Middle Nature, Through Whom Our Aspirations Are Conveyed To The Gods, And Theirs To Us. A Celestial Ladder, A Ladder From Heaven To Earth.

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.

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.

For Us Necessity Is Not As Of Old An Image Without Us, With Whom We Can Do Warfare; It Is A Magic Web Woven Through And Through Us, Like That Magnetic System Of Which Modern Science Speaks, Penetrating Us With A Network Subtler Than Our Subtlest Nerves, Yet Bearing In It The Central Forces Of The World.

But When Reflexion Begins To Play Upon These Objects... Like Some Trick Of Magic Each Object Is Loosed Into A Group Of Impressions - Colour, Odour, Texture... And If We Continue To Dwell In Thought On This World... The Whole Scope Of Observation Is Dwarfed Into The Narrow Chamber Of The Individual Mind.

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.

The Renaissance Of The Fifteenth Century Was, In Many Things, Great Rather By What It Designed Then By What It Achieved.

To Regard All Things And Principles Of Things As Inconstant Modes Or Fashions Has More And More Become The Tendency Of Modern Thought.

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.

It Is With A Rush Of Home-sickness That The Thought Of Death Presents Itself.... Such Sentiment Is The Eternal Stock Of All Religions, Modified Indeed By Changes Of Time And Place, But Indestructible, Because Its Root Is So Deep In The Earth Of Man's Nature. The Breath Of Religious Initiators Passes Over Them; A Few "rise Up With Wings As Eagles" [isaiah 40:31], But The Broad Level Of Religious Life Is Not Permanently Changed. Religious Progress, Like All Purely Spiritual Progress, Is Confined To A Few.

In Truth, The Legitimate Contention Is, Not Of One Age Or School Of Literary Art Against Another, But Of All Successive Schools Alike, Against The Stupidity Which Is Dead To The Substance, And The Vulgarity Which Is Dead To Form.