Marius the Epicurean Quotes

“A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.”
― Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

“How little I myself really need, when people leave me alone, with the intellectual powers at work serenely. The drops of falling water, a few wild flowers with their priceless fragrance, even a few tufts of half-dead leaves, changing colour in the quiet of a room that has but light and shadow in it…”
― Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

“The younger, certainly, had to the full that charm
of a constitutional freshness of aspect which may
defy for a long time extravagant or erring habits of
life; a physiognomy healthy-looking, cleanly, and
firm, which seemed unassociable with any form of
self-tormenting, and made one think of the nozzle of
some young hound or roe, such as human beings
invariably like to stroke—with all the goodliness, that
is, of the finer sort of animalism, though still wholly
animal. It was the charm of the blond head, the
unshrinking gaze, the warm tints:—neither more
nor less than one may see every English summer, in
youth, manly enough, and with the stuff in it which
makes brave soldiers, in spite of the natural kinship
it seems to have with playthings and gay flowers.”
― Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

“There is a certain grief in things as they are, in man as he has come to be, as he certainly is, over and above those griefs of circumstance which are in a measure removable—some inexplicable shortcoming, or misadventure, on the part of nature itself—death, and old age as it must needs be, and that watching for their approach, which makes every stage of life like a dying over and over again. Almost all death is painful, and in every thing that comes to an end a touch of death, and therefore of wretched coldness struck home to one, of remorse, of loss and parting, of outraged attachments. Given faultless men and women, given a perfect state of society which should have no need to practise on men’s susceptibilities for its own selfish ends, adding one turn more to the wheel of the great rack for its own interest or amusement, there would still be this evil in the world, of a certain necessary sorrow and desolation, felt, just in proportion to the moral, or nervous perfection men have attained to. And what we need in the world, over against that, is a certain permanent and general power of compassion—humanity’s standing force of self-pity—as an elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we are to live in it at all. I wonder, sometimes, in what way man has cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing how every step in the capacity of apprehension his labour has won for him, from age to age, must needs increase his dejection. It is as if the increase of knowledge were but an increasing revelation of the radical hopelessness of his position: and I would that there were one even as I, behind this vain show of things!”
― Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean