"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."

Literature

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This quotation examines the core nature of Literature as articulated by Walter Pater. Within historical and literary traditions, reflections on Literature provide actionable mental models, challenging individuals to evaluate personal ethics, self-discipline, and daily actions.

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About Walter Pater

Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken by many as a manifesto of Aestheticism.

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More by 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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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More about Literature

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

— Thomas Carlyle
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"It's amazing to see things that are suggested in the book fully developed and so brilliantly realized through the artistry of the designers."

— Suzanne Collins
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"Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character."

— Hosea Ballou
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"The larger truth, the universal truth that you can give in a novel, is far greater than what you can give through journalism."

— Oriana Fallaci
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