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.
One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.
It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.
My benefactor told me that my father and mother had lived and died just to have me, and that their own parents had done the same for them. He said that warriors were different in that they shift their assemblage points enough to realize the tremendous price that has been paid for their lives. This shift gives them the respect and awe that their parents never felt for life in general, or for being alive in particular.
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
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