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.
The only peace that can be made with a dictator is once that must be based on deterrence. For today, the dictator may be your friend, but tomorrow he will need you as an enemy.
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
The Kingdom of God is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.
Every baby born_x000D_ unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come_x000D_ due in twenty years with interest, an anger_x000D_ that must find a target, a pain that will_x000D_ beget pain. A decade downstream a child_x000D_ screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,_x000D_ a firing squad is summoned, a button_x000D_ is pushed and the world burns.
This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it is supposed to be.
We have before us the fiendishness of business competition and the world war, passion and wrongdoing, antagonism between classes and moral depravity within them, economic tyranny above and the slave spirit below.
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