Marius the Epicurean quotes

One by one, at the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh.

A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place⁠—his own soul was like that!

Would it reach the hands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled?

a confusion had passed from the brain, a painful dryness from his hands.

Simply to be alive and there was a delight; and as he bathed in the fresh water set ready for his use, the air of the room about him seemed like pure gold, the very shadows rich with colour.

Summoned at length by one of the white-robed brethren, he went out to walk in the temple garden.

And still, in his mobility, his animation, in his eager capacity for various life, he was so real an object, after that visionary idealism of the villa.

His voice, his glance, were like the breaking in of the solid world upon one, amid the flimsy fictions of a dream.

A shadow, handling all things as shadows, had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them.

His voice, his glance, were like the breaking in of the solid world upon one, amid the flimsy fictions of a dream.

A shadow, handling all things as shadows, had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them.

Meantime, under his guidance, Marius was learning quickly and abundantly, because with a good will. There was that in the actual effectiveness of his figure which stimulated the younger lad to make the most of opportunity;

But I am no woman if she keep her hold on this great fortune; and if the insult done us has touched thee too, take we counsel together. Meanwhile let us hold our peace, and know naught of her, alive or dead.

For they are not truly happy of whose happiness other folk are unaware.

”

And Psyche, gazing hungrily thereon, draws an arrow from the quiver, and trying the point upon her thumb, tremulous still, drave in the barb, so that a drop of blood came forth.

Thus fell she, by her own act, and unaware, into the love of Love.

Falling upon the bridegroom, with indrawn breath, in a hurry of kisses from eager and open lips, she shuddered as she thought how brief that sleep might be. And it chanced that a drop of burning oil fell from the lamp upon the god’s shoulder.

the suspicion and hatred it so often excites in the vulgar:—these were some of the impressions, forming, as they do, a constant tradition of somewhat cynical pagan experience, from Medusa and Helen downwards, which the old story enforced on him.

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.

The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, coming to Marius just then, figured for him as indeed The Golden Book: he felt a sort of personal gratitude to its writer, and saw in it doubtless far more than was really there for any other reader.

For words, after all, words manipulated with all his delicate force, were to be the apparatus of a war for himself.

To be forcibly impressed, in the first place; and in the next, to find the means of making visible to others that which was vividly apparent, delightful, of lively interest to himself, to the exclusion of all that was but middling, tame, or only half-true even to him

—this scrupulousness of literary art actually awoke in Flavian, for the first time, a sort of chivalrous conscience. What care for style! what patience of execution! what research for the significant tones of ancient idiom—sonantia verba et antiqua!

At length about daybreak he perceived that the last effort had come with a revival of mental clearness, as Marius understood by the contact, light as it was, in recognition of him there.

“Is it a comfort,” he whispered then, “that I shall often come and weep over you?”⁠—“Not unless I be aware, and hear you weeping!”

The sun shone out on the people going to work for a long hot day, and Marius was standing by the dead, watching, with deliberate purpose to fix in his memory every detail, that he might have this picture in reserve, should any hour of …

It was to the sentiment of the body, and the affections it defined—the flesh, of whose force and colour that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue or abstract—he must cling.

The various pathetic traits of the beloved, suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him a materialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee.

As a consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for poetry had passed away, to be replaced by the literature of thought. His much-pondered manuscript verses were laid aside;

… which followed the death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself as if returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant school of healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, on its fresh upland by the sea.

Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed.

And towards such a full or complete life, a life of various yet select sensation, the most direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight.

But—

Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!

—is a proposal, the real import of which differs immensely, according to the natural taste, and the acquired judgment, of the guests who sit at the table.

Amid his eager grasping at the sensation, the consciousness, of the present, he had come to see that, after all, the main point of economy in the conduct of the present, was the question:—

How will it look to me, at what shall I value it, this day next year?

—that in any given day or month one’s main concern was its impression for the memory. A strange trick memory sometimes played him;

Could he but arrest, for others also, certain clauses of experience, as the imaginative memory presented them to himself!

In those grand, hot summers, he would have imprisoned the very perfume of the flowers.

To create, to live, perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours, if it were but in a fragment of perfect expression:—it was thus his longing defined itself for something to hold by amid the “perpetual flux.”

… the healthy body,” but rather of a sacrifice of the body to the soul, its needs and aspirations, that Marius seemed to divine in this assiduous student of the Greek sages—a sacrifice, in truth, far beyond the demands of their very saddest philosophy of life.

Dignify thyself with modesty and simplicity for thine ornaments!

—had been ever a maxim with this dainty and high-bred Stoic, who still thought manners a true part of morals, according to the old sense of the term, and who regrets now and again that he cannot control his thoughts equally well with his countenance.

Like the race of leaves The race of man is:— The wind in autumn strows The earth with old leaves: then the spring with new endows.

Leaves! little leaves!⁠—thy children, thy flatterers, thine enemies!

Leaves in the wind, those who would devote thee to darkness, who scorn or miscall thee here, even as they also whose great fame shall outlast them. For all these, and the like of them, are born indeed in the spring season—ἔαρος ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρῃ:

“Consider how quickly all things vanish away—their bodily structure into the general substance; the very memory of them into that great gulf and abysm of past thoughts.

Ah! ’tis on a tiny space of earth thou art creeping through life⁠—a pygmy soul carrying a dead body to its grave.

“Let death put thee upon the consideration both of thy body and thy soul: what an atom of all matter hath been distributed to thee; what a little particle of the universal mind.

As he ascended into the chapel the emperor paused, and with a grave but friendly look at his young visitor, delivered a parting sentence, audible to him alone:

“Imitation is the most acceptable part of worship:⁠—the gods had much rather mankind should resemble than flatter them. Make sure that those to whom you come nearest be the happier by your presence!”

It was the very spirit of the scene and the hour—the hour Marius had spent in the imperial house. How temperate, how tranquillising! what humanity!

From the hopefulness of this gracious presence, all visible things around him, even the commonest objects of everyday life—if they but stood together to warm their hands at the same fire—took for him a new poetry, a delicate fresh bloom, and interest.

It was as if his bodily eyes had been indeed mystically washed, renewed, strengthened.

And how eagerly, with what a light heart, would Flavian have taken his place in the amphitheatre, among the youth of his own age!

And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that

Cyrenaicism is ever the characteristic philosophy of youth, ardent, but narrow in its survey⁠—sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical.

It is one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of experience (in this case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity of man’s life there) which it may be said to …

“ ’Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt:” he repeated to himself: it was the most serviceable of all the lessons enforced on him by those imperial conversations.—

“ ’Tis in thy power to think as thou wilt.”

And were the cheerful, sociable, restorative beliefs, of which he had there read so much, that bold adhesion, for instance, to the hypothesis of an eternal friend to man, just hidden behind the veil of a mechanical and material order, but only just behind it, …

There reigned throughout, an order and purity, an orderly disposition, as if by way of making ready for some gracious spousals.

The place itself was like a bride adorned for her husband; and its singular cheerfulness, the abundant light everywhere, the sense of peaceful industry, of which he received a deep impression though without precisely reckoning wherein it resided, as he moved on rapidly, were in forcible contrast just at first to the place to which he was next conducted by Cornelius

still with a sort of eager, hurried, half-troubled reluctance, and as if he forbore the explanation which might well be looked for by his companion.

… some strange species wholly alien from himself, accumulating all the lessons of his experience since those first days at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as if in designed congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision, into an actual picture.

If the true value of souls is in proportion to what they can admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul.

As he passed through the various chambers, great and small, one dominant thought increased upon him, the thought of chaste women and their children—of all the various affections of family life under its most natural conditions, yet developed, as if in devout imitation of some …

“Hail! Heavenly Light, from his pure glory poured, Who is the Almighty Father, heavenly, blest:— Worthiest art Thou, at all times to be sung With undefiled tongue.”—

It was like the evening itself made audible, its hopes and fears, with the stars shining in the midst of it.

Half above, half below the level white mist, dividing the light from the darkness, came now the mistress of this place, the wealthy Roman matron, left early a widow a few years before, by Cecilius “Confessor and Saint.”

—

Blame your parents, my child, not me! Or rather, blame mother Nature herself, for giving us but seventy or eighty years instead of making us as long-lived as Tithonus.

For my part, I have but led you from premise to conclusion.

Let me drink out the whole cask. Then I shall be able to tell which is best, and where I ought to buy.’ Yet this is what you would do with the philosophies.

Why drain the cask when you might taste, and see?

—How slippery you are; how you escape from one’s fingers! Still, you have given me an advantage, and are in your own trap.

and do you go forward on this road of yours. Finish the journey in accordance with the view you had of these matters at the beginning of it. Only, be assured that my judgment on it will remain unchanged.

Reason still says, that without criticism, without a clear, exact, unbiased intelligence to try them, all those theories⁠—all things⁠—will have been seen but in vain.

‘To that end,’ she tells us, ‘much time is necessary, many delays of judgment, a cautious gait; repeated inspection.’ And we are not to regard the outward appearance, or the reputation of wisdom, in any of the speakers;

All was easy after that. None of you asked again whether it was the true way; following one after another, like sheep led by the green bough in the hand of the shepherd.

He moved you hither and thither with his finger, as easily as water spilt on a table!

My friend! Be not so lengthy in preparing the banquet, lest you die of hunger! I saw one who poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing useful and necessary;

None of you asked again whether it was the true way; following one after another, like sheep led by the green bough in the hand of the shepherd. He moved you hither and thither with his finger, as easily as water spilt on a table!

My friend! Be not so lengthy in preparing the banquet, lest you die of hunger!

I saw one who poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing useful and necessary; but it remained water only, none the less.”

the very power of utterance and appeal to others seeming to fail us, in proportion as our sorrows come home to ourselves, are really our own.

We are constructed for suffering!

What proofs of it does but one day afford, if we care to note them, as we go—a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mysteries! Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

We are constructed for suffering! What proofs of it does but one day afford, if we care to note them, as we go—a whole long chaplet of sorrowful mysteries!

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

“Men’s fortunes touch us!

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!

“At all events, the actual conditions of our life being as they are, and the capacity for suffering so large a principle in things—since the only principle, perhaps, to which we may always safely trust is a ready sympathy with the pain one actually sees—it …

a realised profit on the summing up of one’s accounts: a touching of that absolute ground amid all the changes of phenomena, such as our philosophers have of late confessed themselves quite unable to discover.

In the mere clinging of human creatures to each other, nay! in one’s own solitary self-pity, amid the effects even of what might appear irredeemable loss, I seem to touch the eternal.

Something in that pitiful contact, something new and true, fact or apprehension of fact, is educed, which, on a review of all the perplexities of life, satisfies our moral sense, and removes that appearance of unkindness in the soul of things themselves, and assures us …