προγραφές

'There is no Greek Madonna ; the goddesses are always childless. The actions selected are those which would be without significance, except in a divine person-binding on a sandal or preparing foe the bath. When a more complex and significant action is permitted, it is most often represented as just finished so that eager expectancy is excluded, as in the image of Apollo just after the slaughter of the Python, or the Venus with the apple of Paris already in her hand.'

'Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life.'

'Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, 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’s sake.'

Walter Pater, The Renaissance, publisher: Macmillan and Co.