Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
Interpretation
Art enriches our experiences by offering beauty and depth in fleeting moments.
Walter Pater's quote emphasizes the idea that art aims to elevate our everyday experiences, encouraging us to appreciate the richness and profundity of each moment. By engaging with art, we can find meaning and quality in the seemingly mundane, transforming our perception of time and existence.
In practice
Using this quote in an art class to inspire students to appreciate the depth of their creations.
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.
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.
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
To me, a building - if it's beautiful - is the love of one man, he's made it out of his love for space, materials, things like that.
There are only 24 hours in a day, and my top priority is working on my films, but I love short film experiments.
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.
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