Walter Pater

We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life.

To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.

A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.

Rousseau … asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.

How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is …

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

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.