Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist, literary and art critic, and writer of fiction. Read full biography of Walter Pater →
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
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... →
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.
No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to... →
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
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... →
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... →
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... →
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... →
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... →
What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of... →
With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we... →
Walter Horatio Pater (4 August 1839 – 30 July 1894) was an English essayist, literary and art critic, and writer of fiction.