Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
Interpretation
Art enriches our experiences by offering beauty and depth in fleeting moments.
Walter Pater's quote emphasizes the idea that art aims to elevate our everyday experiences, encouraging us to appreciate the richness and profundity of each moment. By engaging with art, we can find meaning and quality in the seemingly mundane, transforming our perception of time and existence.
In practice
Using this quote in an art class to inspire students to appreciate the depth of their creations.
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life . . . Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end . . . 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.
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
I'm glad about what's happening to the music business. This last crop of people we had in the 90s, who are going away now, they didn't like music. They didn't trust musicians. They wanted something else from it.
My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.
I want paint to work as flesh.
Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective.
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in.
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