To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Walter Pater’s line comes from the famous “Conclusion” to his collection of essays *The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry* (1873). Written in the intellectual climate of late-Victorian aestheticism, the passage distills Pater’s emphasis on heightened perception and intense experience in the face of life’s transience. The “Conclusion” was controversial: its apparent advocacy of hedonistic “aesthetic” living drew criticism, and Pater later revised and softened parts of it in subsequent editions. The sentence is often quoted as a manifesto-like summary of Pater’s ideal of living deliberately—seeking moments of vivid awareness rather than conventional moral or social measures of success.

The “hard, gemlike flame” suggests a concentrated, lucid intensity—an inner brightness that is both beautiful and disciplined (“hard,” not diffuse). Pater argues that because experience is fleeting and the self is in constant flux, the best “success” is not accumulation or reputation but sustaining a heightened state of awareness: an “ecstasy” of perception, feeling, and thought. The line encapsulates aestheticism’s valuation of quality of experience over quantity of years, urging readers to refine their sensibilities and seize the present. It can be read as an ethical provocation as well as an artistic credo: to live as if attention itself were a moral act.

1) “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”