Walter Pater Quotes

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

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

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 molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

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

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

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