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.
Interpretation
Experience inundates us with external realities that demand our attention and action.
Walter Pater's quote reflects the overwhelming nature of experience, suggesting that the multitude of external stimuli can often feel oppressive. This sharp and relentless reality draws us away from introspection, compelling us to engage actively with the world around us in various ways.
In practice
In a lecture on existentialism, one might reference this quote to discuss the profound impact of experience on human behavior.
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.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
Has the God who made the white man and the black left any record declaring us a different species? Are we not sustained by the same power, supported by the same food. . . . And should we not then enjoy the same liberty. . .?
Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what’s happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what’s happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self.
These practices - non-killing, truthfulness, non-stealing, chastity, and non-receiving - are to be practised by every man, woman, and child; by every soul, irrespective of nation, country, or position.
how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?
A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.
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