Success Quote by Arthur Machen

Machen is making failure sound almost aristocratic, and that is exactly the point: he redraws the moral map so that success is not automatically a virtue. The line turns on a deliciously snobbish contrast - “exquisite things” versus “the utterly contemptible” - where aesthetic language becomes ethical language. “Exquisite” isn’t just pretty; it implies rarity, craft, and a certain spiritual altitude. “Department” is the sly jab: contemptible work is bureaucratized, routinized, safe enough to earn promotions. You can build a whole respectable life inside a machine that deadens you.

The intent is less motivational-poster than cultural provocation. Machen, a writer steeped in late-Victorian Decadence and mystical longing, distrusts the era’s utilitarian worship of measurable outcomes. He’s defending the costly, fragile kind of ambition that risks embarrassment. The subtext is that modernity trains us to optimize: pick the lane where you can win, scale it, call it a career. Machen calls that bargain “utterly contemptible,” not because failure is romantic, but because certain successes are spiritually cheap - they ask nothing of the self except compliance.

Notice the quiet hedge: “he thought.” Machen doesn’t thunder; he lets the character’s private calculus do the work, which makes the sentiment feel earned rather than preached. The line flatters no one. It challenges the reader to ask a nasty question: if you’re winning, what exactly are you winning at?