With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the fleeting nature of life and the importance of experiencing it fully rather than overanalyzing it.
Walter Pater's quote emphasizes the significance of embracing the richness of our experiences despite their transient nature. He suggests that in our quest to fully engage with life, we should focus on the act of experiencing rather than getting lost in excessive theorizing; this sentiment encourages a deeper appreciation for the present moment.
In practice
In a conversation about living fully, one could quote Pater to emphasize the importance of seizing the moment.
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.
I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready.
My only fear of death is reincarnation
If life's journey be endless where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere. We are in a palace which has no end, but which we have reached. By exploring it and extending our relationship with it we are ever making it more and more our own.
Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.
I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.
Human beings were put on the planet to depend upon their Creator and to worship their Creator at every point in every sphere of culture.
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