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.
In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.
Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life - all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self - is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.
We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.
A man who is seeking for realization is not only going around searching for his spectacles without realizing that they are on his nose all the time, but also were he not actually looking through them he would not be able to see what he is looking for!
Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully. Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh; "my name means the shape I am - and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.
When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
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