Walter Pater — English Critic born on August 04, 1839, died on July 30, 1894

Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, literary and art critic, and writer of fiction... (wikipedia)

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.
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.