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.
It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.
The greatest evil that can befall man is that he should come to think ill of himself.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing.
Careful the spell you cast, not just on children. Sometimes the spell may last Past what you can see And turn against you... Careful the tale you tell. That is the spell.
No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.
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