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.
People should be more like animals . . . they should be more intuitive; they should not be too conscious of what they do while they do it.
Genuine good taste consists in saying much in few words, in choosing among our thoughts, in having order and arrangement in what we say, and in speaking with composure.
Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.
The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry.
I always started a job with the feeling that I'd soon quit or be fired, and this gave ma a relaxex manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.
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