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.
What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
When I was 18 and not sure whether I wanted to be an actor, I realised that a playwright has no voice without an actor. That's my reason for acting: to get that character as right as possible for my writer. And I have never changed my philosophy.
My wish is to be known only thru my work.
I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.
I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.
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