Pater Quotes

She went as through a forest
the columns were furrowed like ancient trees, and in through the forest flowed the light, many-hued and clear as song, from the pictured windows. High up above her, beasts and men sported among the stone leafage, and angels played
and yet far, dizzily far higher, the vaulting soared, lifting the church towards God. In a hall that lay to one side, worship was being held at an altar. Kristin sank down on her knees by a pillar. The singing cut into her like a too strong light. Now she saw how low she lay in the dust ... Pater noster. Credo in unum Deum. Ave Maria, gratia plena. ~ Sigrid Undset

But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects ... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture ... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world ... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. ~ Walter Pater

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul. ~ Oscar Wilde

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 ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. ~ Walter Pater

It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively. ~ Walter Pater

It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off - that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves. ~ Walter Pater

Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. ~ Walter Pater

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry. ~ Walter Pater

They've destroyed small farms and local economies across the globe. And now, they own patents on the seeds themselves. Those seeds represent the knowledge, labor, and heritage of all of humanity, and their DNA is now owned by Monsanto and ConAgra and ADM. They're the oligarchs of food, the pater familias of life itself. "The ownership, genetic code, practices and profits of agriculture are being collected in fewer and fewer hands - hands that have no dirt under the fingernails," writes George Pyle. ~ Anonymous

A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness. So I'll make a thick turban from several towels to muffle the shot and soak up the blood, and do it in the bathtub, so it shouldn't stain any carpets. Last night I left a letter under the manager's day-office door - he'll find it at eight A.M. tomorrow - informing him of the change in my existential status, so with luck an innocent chambermaid will be spared an unpleasant surprise. See, I do think of the little people ~ David Mitchell

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

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 by unconnected roads. ~ Walter Pater

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

I leave it to Pater Leoden to distribute the remainder of my worldly goods among the parish, as, being an immoral soul, I will have no further need of them."
"You mean, immortal, don't you?" Chronicler asked uncertainly. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself ... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few. ~ 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. ~ Walter Pater

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. ~ Walter Pater

Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame ~ Allen Ginsberg

I am pleased to be praised by a man so praised as you, father. [Words used by Hector.]
[Lat., Laetus sum
Laudari me abs te, pater, laudato viro.] ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The soup-kitchen was behind the cathedral; it remained only to determine which, of the many and beautiful churches of Cracow, was the cathedral. Whom could one ask, and how? A priest walked by; I would ask the priest. Now the priest, young and of benign appearance, understood neither French nor German; as a result, for the first and only time in my post-scholastic career, I reaped the fruits of years of classical studies, carrying on the most extravagant and chaotic of conversations in Latin. After the initial request for information (Pater optime, ubi est menas pauperorum?), we began to speak confusedly of everything, of my being a Jew, of the Lager (castra? better: Lager, only too likely to be understood by everybody), of Italy, of the danger of speaking German in public (which I was to understand soon after, by direct experience), and of innumerable other things, to which the unusual dress of the language gave a curious air of the remotest past. ~ Primo Levi

All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage. ~ Walter Pater

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 of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. ~ Walter Pater

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult. ~ Walter Pater

Never back the Praesi in a corner, son. That's when the devil-summoning starts, and it's all downhill from there."
-King Jehan of Callow, addressing the future King Pater the Unheeding ~ ErraticErrata

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. ~ Walter Pater

The family consists of those who live under the same roof with the pater familias ; those who form (if I may use the expression) his fire-side. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Memory! Never, ever forgive the parents that. Remembered our last send-off one drizzly autumn afternoon at Audley End, Adrian was in uniform, Pater clasping him. Days of bunting and cheering were long over - later heard Military Police were escorting conscripts to Dunkirk to deter mass desertions. All those Adrians jammed like pilchards in cemeteries throughout eastern France, western Belgium, beyond. We ~ David Mitchell

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

Walter Pater said that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, but I've always felt that music aspires to the condition of words. ~ John Ashbery

People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. ~ David Mitchell

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 senses? ~ Walter Pater

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author's sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank's illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit.

But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. 'I have often thought', he said to himself, 'that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.' He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep.

He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works…

It turned out to be the Boy's Gulliver's Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift's delightful fable, and th ~ Margaret Irwin

Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists. ~ Walter Pater

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved. ~ Walter Pater

By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King's College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English essayist and
critic Walter Pater (1839–94). Woolf was very fond of Clara and an exchange between them later became the basis for her short story 'Moments of Being: Slater's Pins Have No Points' (1928). Thoby boarded at Clifton College,
Bristol, Adrian was a dayboy at Westminster School, and Vanessa attended Cope's School of Art. Thoby, and later Adrian, eventually went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Vanessa undertook training in the visual arts (attending the Slade School of Fine Art for a while). From 1902 Virginia's tuition in classics passed from Clara Pater to the very capable Janet Case, one of the first graduates from Girton College, Cambridge, and a committed feminist. The sisters visited Cambridge a number of times to meet Thoby, whose friends there included Clive Bell 1881–1964), Lytton Strachey (1880– 1932), Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) and Saxon Sydney-Turner. ~ Jane Goldman

The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited. ~ Walter Pater

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. ~ Walter Pater

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. ~ Walter Pater

To a blare of trumpets Peter the Apostle was dragged onto the track. He'd been arrested along with the priest Cornelius and several followers at a Christian house near the Pincian Hill. When the soldiers arrived Peter had smiled at them as if he were welcoming old friends. Pater was hauled onto a high wooden platform at the center of the racetrack for all to see and Tigellinus loudly proclaimed him to be the ringleader of the plot to destroy Rome. ~ Glenn Cooper

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us - for that moment only. ~ Walter Pater

The lovelorn, the cry-for-helpers, all mawkish tragedians who give suicide a bad name are the idiots who rush it, like amateur conductors.A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, 'Suicide is selfishness.' Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reasons: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. The only selfishness lies in ruining strangers' days by forcing 'em to witness a grotesqueness. ~ David Mitchell

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. ~ Walter Pater

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. ~ Walter Pater

The younger, certainly, had to the full that charm
of a constitutional freshness of aspect which may
defy for a long time extravagant or erring habits of
life; a physiognomy healthy-looking, cleanly, and
firm, which seemed unassociable with any form of
self-tormenting, and made one think of the nozzle of
some young hound or roe, such as human beings
invariably like to stroke - with all the goodliness, that
is, of the finer sort of animalism, though still wholly
animal. It was the charm of the blond head, the
unshrinking gaze, the warm tints: - neither more
nor less than one may see every English summer, in
youth, manly enough, and with the stuff in it which
makes brave soldiers, in spite of the natural kinship
it seems to have with playthings and gay flowers. ~ Walter Pater

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. ~ Walter Pater

To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. ~ Walter Pater

To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions. ~ 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

A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment - and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again. ~ 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

Art is self-sufficient and need serve no moral or political purpose ~ Walter Pater

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

All art constantly aspires to the condition of music ... In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other ... ~ Walter Pater

Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with my
fanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, but
whatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none
of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and Algernon
Swinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it. ~ Rob Sheffield

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. ~ Walter Pater

For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. ~ Walter Pater

penitenziagite! watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! death is super nos! pray the santo pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! ha ha, you like this negromanzia de domini nostri jesu christi! et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors...cave el diabolo! semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. but salvatore is not stupidus! bonum monsasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. and the resto is not worth merda. amen. no? ~ Umberto Eco

And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object. ~ Walter Pater

Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.
To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. ~ Walter Pater

A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable. ~ Walter Pater

Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois. ~ Charles Baudelaire

That the mere matter of a poem, for instance
its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture
the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape
should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees. ~ Walter Pater

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without - our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them - the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain by every ray of light and sound - processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them - a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces p ~ Walter Pater