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.
Interpretation
The quote discusses the challenge of defining beauty in a universal way.
Walter Pater reflects on the ongoing endeavors of writers and artists to capture the essence of beauty in art and poetry. He suggests that despite the countless attempts to articulate a clear and universal definition, beauty remains an elusive and subjective concept that cannot be easily confined to general terms or formulas.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of art, one might say, 'As Walter Pater noted, defining beauty is a complex task that goes beyond mere words.'
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.
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.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.
We've got people looking at our seamy side and our sad side a lot of the time because that's easier. It's much more difficult to make a film about happiness with lots of jokes in it.
Music is the language spoken by angels.
I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.
I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.
There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.
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