Walter PaterAll 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.
About This Quote
In art, the distinction between subject and object, between the material of art and the form in which it is expressed, disappears. This is why music is “music” and painting is “painting,” while poetry is “poetry.” Art has a goal to pursue: it aims to arouse a feeling in a man that he cannot help but recognize as his own.
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More Quotes By Walter Pater
- To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
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- 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...
- 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,...
- 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,...