Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
Interpretation
The value lies in the experiences we have rather than the outcomes they produce.
Walter Pater's quote emphasizes that the essence of life is found in the experiences we acquire along the way, rather than solely focusing on the results or achievements that those experiences yield. It suggests that the journey and the learning from each moment are more significant than the final product or 'fruit' of our efforts.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
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.
How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?
It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.
It is unity that doth enchant me. By her power I am free though thrall, happy in sorrow, rich in poverty, and quick even in death.
Go where he will, the wise man is at home, His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome.
Like a twisted olive tree in its 500th year, giving then its finest fruit, is man. How can he give forth wisdom until he has been crushed and turned in the Hand of God.
Of all wild beasts preserve me from a tyrant; and of all tame a flatterer.
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