Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1

“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

“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

“The younger, certainly, had to the full that charmof a constitutional freshness of aspect which maydefy for a long time extravagant or erring habits oflife; a physiognomy healthy-looking, cleanly, andfirm, which seemed unassociable with any form ofself-tormenting, and made one think of the nozzle ofsome young hound or roe, such as human beingsinvariably like to stroke”

— Walter Pater

“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”

— Walter Pater