Browse 10 quotations connecting Walter Pater with Art, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style.
“in literary as in all other art, structure is all-important”
Pater treats structure as a governing discipline: a work should be conceived as a whole whose parts remain related to its beginning, direction and intended end.
Source note: Appreciations, essay “Style”; Project Gutenberg #4037. The surrounding sentence develops the metaphor of an architectural conception of a literary work.
“makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent sort of training towards the things of art and poetry.”
Pater presents sustained engagement with a difficult poet as a form of aesthetic training, implying that taste and discrimination can be developed through repeated attentive reading.
Source note: Appreciations, essay on Wordsworth; Project Gutenberg #4037. The sentence refers specifically to the contrast Pater perceives between higher and lower qualities in Wordsworth’s poetry.
“a habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of concentration and collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of poetry”
Pater describes demanding reading as training in concentration and inference, where appreciation grows through disciplined attention instead of quick surface consumption.
Source note: Appreciations, essay on Wordsworth; Project Gutenberg #4037. Pater is describing the kind of training he believes Wordsworth can produce in receptive readers.
“all progress of mind consists for the most part in differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object into its component aspects”
Pater describes intellectual progress as learning to distinguish parts within what initially seems confused, a method that makes clearer categories and more exact judgment possible.
Source note: Appreciations, essay “Style”; Project Gutenberg #4037. The immediate example concerns distinctions between prose, verse and poetry.
“He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms.”
The sentence resists a single narrow standard of beauty and asks the critic to remain open to excellence appearing through different periods, types and schools.
Source note: The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398. The following sentences extend the point across periods and schools of taste.
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
Pater uses music as his model for the closest possible union of form and content, a critical claim about artistic structure rather than a literal hierarchy of media.
Source note: 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.
“To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible”
Pater begins aesthetic criticism by preferring close attention to particular works and experiences over a universal formula, making discrimination and concrete observation central to judgment.
Source note: The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398, represented sixth-edition text. The phrase introduces Pater’s method of aesthetic criticism.
“art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass”
Pater values art for intensifying the quality of passing moments rather than promising an external reward, connecting aesthetic attention directly with his philosophy of finite experience.
Source note: The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The statement belongs to Pater’s aesthetic account of how art affects lived moments.
“Our education becomes complete in proportion as our susceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety.”
Pater describes education as an increasing capacity to notice and distinguish varied impressions, so development involves deepening responsiveness rather than merely accumulating information.
Source note: The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398. “These impressions” refers to responses produced by art, landscape, personality and other aesthetic objects.
“the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.”
Critical judgment begins with accurately noticing one’s own response before turning that response into a claim about the work, making self-observation part of disciplined interpretation.
Source note: The Renaissance, Preface; Project Gutenberg #2398. Pater is describing aesthetic criticism, not claiming that personal impression alone settles every factual question.