Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that our experiences are shaped by our unique personalities, which can create barriers to true understanding and communication.
Walter Pater reflects on the nature of human experience, arguing that while we gather impressions from the world around us, our individual personalities act as a barrier that distorts these experiences. This 'thick wall' of personality prevents us from fully grasping the reality beyond our perceptions and makes authentic communication difficult, leaving us to only speculate about the truths that exist outside of our subjective experiences.
In practice
In a discussion on the importance of empathy, one might reference this quote to highlight how personal biases can affect our understanding of others.
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.
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
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.
Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.
Force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that_x000D_ tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.
What I find very interesting is, we're not enthralled by the ancient world, and we've escaped all kinds of ancient preconceptions and assumptions and prejudices. But, nevertheless, we still make that connection between authoritative speech and male speech.
I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.
No one has yet believed in God and the kingdom of heaven, no one has heard about his realm of the resurrected, and not been homesick from that hour, waiting and looking forward joyfully to being released from bodily existenceDeath is hell and night and cold, if it is not transformed by our faith. But that is just what is so marvelous, that we can transform death.
People like to pigeonhole and say, Well, I'm a Washington insider, and you know, that's quite silly. What does that even mean?
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