Walter Pater Quotes

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to interest.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it's simply necessary to love.

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

I can weep pretty easily. I can get tears in my eyes from a beautiful work of art.

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

Art is always good. It just depends if you like or not.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.