Walter Pater Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes

Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, essay “Style,” printed page 21 in the Macmillan 1910 Library Edition pagination reproduced by Project Gutenberg #4037. “in literary as in all other art, structure is all-important” introduces Pater’s architectural account of composition, where a work’s end is foreseen in its beginning and each part remains conscious of the rest.

Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, essay “Wordsworth,” printed page 41 in the Macmillan 1910 Library Edition pagination reproduced by Project Gutenberg #4037. Pater says that the contrast between Wordsworth’s higher and lower poetic moods “makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent sort of training towards the things of art and poetry.” This remains Pater’s critical judgment about aesthetic training, not an experimentally established educational outcome.

Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, essay “Wordsworth,” printed page 42 in the Macmillan 1910 Library Edition pagination reproduced by Project Gutenberg #4037. The reading-between-the-lines passage follows Pater’s claim that Wordsworth-reading can train aesthetic discrimination; he attributes to receptive readers a habit of inference plus faith in concentration and collectedness of mind. This remains nineteenth-century literary criticism rather than cognitive-science evidence.

Appreciations, with an Essay on Style, essay “Style,” printed page 5 in the standard Macmillan 1910 Library Edition pagination reproduced by Project Gutenberg #4037. “all progress of mind consists for the most part in differentiation...” opens Pater’s argument by distinguishing prose, verse and poetry. This is literary-aesthetic criticism, not a modern experimental claim about cognition or learning.

The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398. The following sentences extend the point across periods and schools of taste.

The Renaissance, “The School of Giorgione”; Project Gutenberg #2398. The surrounding paragraph explains that other arts strive to reduce the separation between matter and form.

The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. This is an aesthetic-philosophical thesis, not a universal empirical rule for how everyone ought to live.

The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398, represented sixth-edition text. The phrase introduces Pater’s method of aesthetic criticism.

The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The metaphor belongs to Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and should not be reduced to generic productivity advice.

The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The statement belongs to Pater’s aesthetic account of how art affects lived moments.

The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The line follows an explicit meditation on life’s brevity and precedes Pater’s claims for art and passionate activity.

The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398. “These impressions” refers to responses produced by art, landscape, personality and other aesthetic objects.

The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The line belongs to Pater’s historically controversial conclusion on experience and culture.

The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The sentence names Comte, Hegel and one’s own orthodoxy in its immediate continuation.

The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398. Pater is describing aesthetic criticism, not claiming that personal impression alone settles every factual question.