Success Quote by Walter Pater

Pater is taking a scalpel to one of modern life’s favorite coping mechanisms: habit. He doesn’t romanticize routine as discipline or stability; he treats it as a bargain we make with a world we’ve decided is “stereotyped.” The sly provocation is that habit isn’t a virtue we cultivate but a symptom of perception gone lazy. When he calls likeness “only the roughness of the eye,” he flips the usual hierarchy: sameness isn’t an objective feature of reality, it’s what happens when attention dulls and stops registering difference.

The intent is aesthetic and ethical at once. As a late-Victorian critic tied to aestheticism, Pater is arguing for the primacy of refined perception: to really see is to resist the mind’s cost-cutting tendency to compress experience into categories. His subtext is quietly anti-bourgeois. A “stereotyped world” is the world of schedules, respectable expectations, repeatable roles; habit keeps that machine running by training us not to notice the singularity of people and moments. That’s why he frames “failure” paradoxically: we fail not by lacking habits, but by relying on them, surrendering our capacity for fresh discrimination.

Context matters: this is a Victorian moment anxious about mechanization, mass culture, and the standardization of taste. Pater’s move is to locate resistance not in politics but in perception itself. If the world starts to feel like it’s repeating, he implies, check your eyesight before you blame reality.