| The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996. |
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| NUMBER: | 43824 |
| QUOTATION: | Dionysus, as we see him in art and poetry, is the projected expression of the ways and dreams of this primitive people, brooded over and harmonised by the energetic Greek imagination; the religious imagination of the Greeks being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing together things naturally asunder, making, as it were, for the human body a soul of waters, for the human soul a body of flowers; welding into something like the identity of a human personality the whole range of man’s experiences of a given object, or series of objects—all the hidden ordinances by which those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, and have their roots in purely visionary places. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Walter Pater (1839–1894), British writer, educator. originally published in Fortnightly Review (Dec. 1876). “A Study of Dionysus,” pp. 22-3, repr. In Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, Macmillan (1895).
Posthumously prepared for the press by Charles L. Shadwell. |
| BIOGRAPHY: | Columbia Encyclopedia. |
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| | | The Columbia World of Quotations. Copyright © 1996 Columbia University Press. |
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