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 shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
Walter Pater

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

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 excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.
Walter Pater

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

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.
Walter Pater

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.
Walter Pater

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
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