Walter Pater Quotes
English - Critic August 4, 1839 - July 30, 1894

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

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

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

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

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.
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

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.
Walter Pater

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

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.
Walter Pater

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

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

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

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

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.
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

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

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

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

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

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
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.
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

With myself, how to pass time becomes sometimes the question - unavoidably, though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad in a life so short as ours.
Walter Pater

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


Louis Armstrong Quotes
American - Musician August 4, 1901 - July 6, 1971



Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
Louis Armstrong

Music is life itself. What would this world be without good music? No matter what kind it is.
Louis Armstrong

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.
Louis Armstrong

I warm up at home. I hit the stage, I'm ready, whether it's rehearsal or anything.
Louis Armstrong

What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
Louis Armstrong

I never want to be anything more than I am; what I don't have, I don't need.
Louis Armstrong

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.
Louis Armstrong

All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.
Louis Armstrong

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.
Louis Armstrong

'Cat?' 'Cat' can be anybody from the guy in the gutter to a lawyer, doctor, the biggest man to the lowest man, but if he's in there with a good heart and enjoy the same music together, he's a cat.
Louis Armstrong

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them.
Louis Armstrong

You blows who you is.
Louis Armstrong

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.
Louis Armstrong

I gathered that those two Big-shot Boys, Joe + Fletcher, just was afraid to let me sing, thinking maybe I'd sort of ruin their reputations with their musical public. They not knowing that I had been singing all of my life. In churches, etc. I had one of the finest All Boys Quartets that ever walked the streets of New Orleans.
Louis Armstrong

The first time I heard Jack Teagarden on the trombone, I had goose pimples all over.
Louis Armstrong

I do believe that my whole success goes back to that time I was arrested as a wayward boy at the age of thirteen. Because then I had to quit running around and began to learn something. Most of all, I began to learn music.
Louis Armstrong

When the other kids started calling me nicknames, I knew everything was all right. I have a pretty big mouth, so they hit on that and began calling me Gatemouth or Satchelmouth, and that Satchelmouth has stuck to me all my life, except that now it's been made into 'Satchmo' - 'Satchmo' Armstrong.
Louis Armstrong

I had a long time admiration for the Jewish people. Especially with their long time of courage, taking so much abuse for so long. I was only seven years old, but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.
Louis Armstrong

We never did try to get together and to show the younger Negroes such as myself, to try and even to show that he has ambitions - and with just a little encouragement, I could have really done something worthwhile. But instead, we did nothing but let the young upstarts know that they were young and simple, and that was that.
Louis Armstrong

When I play, maybe 'Back o' Town Blues,' I'm thinking about one of the old, low-down moments - when maybe your woman didn't treat you right. That's a hell of a moment when a woman tell you, 'I got another mule in my stall.'
Louis Armstrong

I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so.
Louis Armstrong

I like kissable lips. A woman's lips must say, 'Come here and kiss me, Pops.'
Louis Armstrong

When this ugly gangster told Joe Glaser that he must take the name of Armstrong down, off of the marquee, and it was an 'order from Al Capone,' Mr. Glaser looked this cat straight in the face and told him these words: 'I think that Louis Armstrong is the world's greatest, and this is my place, and I defy anybody to take his name down from there.'
Louis Armstrong

Well, I tell you... the first chorus, I plays the melody. The second chorus, I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus, I routines.
Louis Armstrong