"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."

Love

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Insight & Reflection

This reflection on love by Walter Pater resonates across generations. It highlights a fundamental truth about human nature: our continuous search for meaning in love is what ultimately defines our character and our path forward.

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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Editorial Note: This quote is curated and fact-checked by the ShortQuote Editorial Team. Verified Literature Specialist.

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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"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music."

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

— Walter Pater
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"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
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More about Love

"I love these movies where it's just about the film. You don't have my face on the poster. It's all about the movie. I like that."

— John Cusack
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"What I really honestly want is just to be working steadily... I would love to just be on a great TV show and have it run for awhile."

— Carla Gallo
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"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

— Anais Nin
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"I love memoirs and autobiographies in general."

— Brett Davern
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