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.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
The single clenched fist lifted and ready, Or the open asking hand held out and waiting. Choose: For we meet by one or the other.
The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.
We have an idea that we Americans are God's chosen people, that God loves us more than any other people, and that we are God's blessed. I tell you that God doesn't love us any more than He does the Russians.
Why don’t you try wandering with me to the Palace of Not-Even-Anything
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
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