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.
Interpretation
Experience inundates us with external realities that demand our attention and action.
Walter Pater's quote reflects the overwhelming nature of experience, suggesting that the multitude of external stimuli can often feel oppressive. This sharp and relentless reality draws us away from introspection, compelling us to engage actively with the world around us in various ways.
In practice
In a lecture on existentialism, one might reference this quote to discuss the profound impact of experience on human behavior.
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.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
If you tell people you talk to God, they'll think you're religious, but if you say God talks to you, it's ten to one they'll think you're crazy.
I've had years of bizarre hallucinogenic magical experiences in which I believed I had communicated with entities that may well have been disassociated parts of my own personality or conceivably some independent entity of a metaphysical nature. Both would seem equally interesting.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.
There must be something beyond slaughter and barbarism to support the existence of mankind and we must all help search for it.
Being harmless means being so strong, so empowered, that the idea of showing power through harm is not even a part of your consciousness.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.