Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that our experiences are shaped by our unique personalities, which can create barriers to true understanding and communication.
Walter Pater reflects on the nature of human experience, arguing that while we gather impressions from the world around us, our individual personalities act as a barrier that distorts these experiences. This 'thick wall' of personality prevents us from fully grasping the reality beyond our perceptions and makes authentic communication difficult, leaving us to only speculate about the truths that exist outside of our subjective experiences.
In practice
In a discussion on the importance of empathy, one might reference this quote to highlight how personal biases can affect our understanding of others.
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.
We are one nation under God, and we may call that God different names but we remain one nation.
Over the years, there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin.
It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.
To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings
How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements?
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