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“Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les homes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of the world,’ in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterred or others, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

—Walter Pater, conclusion to “The Renaissance,” from Studies in Art and Poetry (1873).

Anton Chekhov: Between Good and Evil

Let the jury judge them; it’s my job simply to show what sort of people they are … Of course it would be pleasant to combine art with a sermon, but for me personally it is extremely difficult and almost impossible, owing to the conditions of technique … If I introduce subjectivity, the image becomes blurred and the story will not be as compact as all short stories ought to be. When I write, I reckon entirely upon the reader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in the story.

- Anton Chekhov, letter (1890)

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with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
John Keats (letter, 1817)
“Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les homes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of the world,’ in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterred or others, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

—Walter Pater, The Renaissance, Studies in Art and Poetry. Conclusion.

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As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognize the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.
Oscar Wilde (via mycolorbook)
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It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions… The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.

Excerpt of “La Gioconda,” from Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, describing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

Never have I loved a piece of criticism as much as Pater’s. Beautifully written as to give justice to great works of art. I may not agree with Oscar Wilde on some things, but Pater’s great decadent essays should be savored.  

(via livelymind)

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The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.
Victor Hugo - Les Misérables (via decembrist)

(Source: decembrist)

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The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all around him. She had become a physical necessity.
George Orwell, 1984 (via larmoyante)