Appreciations, with an Essay on Style

“As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm”

— Walter Pater

“There are no beautiful thoughts (he [Flaubert] would say) without beautiful forms, and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a physical body the qualities which really constitute it”

— Walter Pater

“Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one verb to animate it, he [Flaubert] gave himself to superhuman labour for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. In this way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, and when a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seeking another, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold of the unique word.... A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of expression, there is but one”

— Walter Pater

“Self-restraint, a skilful economy of means, ascêsis, that too has a beauty of its own; and for the reader supposed there will be an aesthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness of style which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from every sentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to thought, in the logically filled space connected always with the delightful sense of difficulty overcome.””

— Walter Pater

“All beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.””

— Walter Pater