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. (Walter Pater)
Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. (Walter Pater)
Every intellectual product must be judged from the point-of-view of the age and the people in which it was produced. (Walter Pater)
What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions. (Walter Pater)
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. (Walter Pater)
The aim of a true achievement must lie, not in futile efforts towards the complete accommodation of man to circumstances in which he chances to find himself, but in the maintenance of a kind of candid discontent, in the face of the very highest achie. (Walter Pater)
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. (Walter Pater)
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. (Walter Pater)
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. (Walter Pater)
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. (Walter Pater)
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. (Walter Pater)
Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. (Walter Pater)
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed that by what it achieved. (Walter Pater)
No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. (Walter Pater)