"To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ectasy, is success in life...We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve...we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more...our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love...Only be sure it passion--that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
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