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.
Interpretation
The quote discusses the challenge of defining beauty in a universal way.
Walter Pater reflects on the ongoing endeavors of writers and artists to capture the essence of beauty in art and poetry. He suggests that despite the countless attempts to articulate a clear and universal definition, beauty remains an elusive and subjective concept that cannot be easily confined to general terms or formulas.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of art, one might say, 'As Walter Pater noted, defining beauty is a complex task that goes beyond mere words.'
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.
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.
Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.
I don't want to repeat myself. I'm not going to play a guy like Allen in Happiness again any time soon because I did that and I don't want to tarnish or dilute that film by doing it again, maybe less well.
As musicians and artists, it's important we have an environment - and I guess when I say environment, I really mean the industry, that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes, the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society.
Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.
Melody is the essence of music.
For those who were desperate, my camera became an object of hope (...)Throughout my year-long coverage of the monsoon world, my strongest conviction was that I was involved in the fundamentals of life.
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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