Top 88 Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes
#1. I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#2. Water drunk more reverently still, from the hands or from the spring itself, diffuses within us the most secret salt of earth and the rain of heaven.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#4. A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#5. Leaving behind books is even more beautiful - there are far too many children.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#6. I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#7. The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#8. A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#9. The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up meat attractive to flies.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#10. Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#11. Attianus had been right in his conjectures: the virgin gold of respect would be too soft without some alloy of fear.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#12. Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#13. That imperial guard which poets and humanists mount in relay around any great memory.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#14. The press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#16. The world is big ... May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#17. The written word has taught me to listen to the human voice, much as the great unchanging statues have taught me to appreciate bodily motions. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#18. Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#19. That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to a love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#20. Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul ...
Marguerite Yourcenar
#21. Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#22. Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#23. Human beings betray their worst failings when they marvel to find that a world ruler is neither foolishly indolent, presumptuous, nor cruel.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#24. Age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#25. The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead ...
Marguerite Yourcenar
#26. I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#27. Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#28. the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#30. He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#31. If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory. Translation by David Downie
Marguerite Yourcenar
#32. And I reminded myself that the reproach of intellectualism is often directed at the most sensitive natures, those most ardently alive, those obliged by their frailty or their excess of strength constantly to resort to the arduous disciplines of the mind.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#33. There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#34. This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#35. Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or to change it, lest the contempt into which that rash ruling has fallen should extend to other, more just legislation.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#36. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when the presume to anticipate custom.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#37. Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#39. When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is too complex.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#41. I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like the others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#42. Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others ...
Marguerite Yourcenar
#43. To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#44. It is not that I despise men. If I did I should have no right, and no reason, to try to govern.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#46. I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers - the emotional storage is done very early on.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#47. It displeases me to have some creature think that he can foresee and profit from my desire, automatically adapting himself to what he supposes to be my taste.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#48. In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#49. The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#51. Overhead shone the great star of the constellation of Lyra, destined to be the polar star for men who will live tens of thousands of years after we have ceased to be.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#52. All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#53. The world, which is sometimes too stern, compensates for its harshness with its inattention.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#54. On the whole, however, it is only out of pride or gross ignorance, or cowardice, that we refuse to see in the present the lineaments of times to come.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#56. Suffering turns us into egotists, for it absorbs us completely: it is later, in the form of memory, that it teaches us compassion.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#57. I will not fall. I have reached the center. I listen to the striking of who knows what divine clock through the thin carnal wall of a life full of blood, of shudderings, and of breathings. I am near the mysterious kernel of things as one is sometimes near a heart at night.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#58. Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#59. Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#60. For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#62. It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#63. To eat fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected like us by earth; it is to consume a sacrifice wherein we sustain ourselves at the expense of things.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#65. [On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?
Marguerite Yourcenar
#66. I did not love less; indeed I loved more. But the weight of love, like that of an arm thrown tenderly across a chest, becomes little by little too heavy to bear.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#68. Those sages of the ancient world, unbound by dogma of any kind, thought as we do in terms of physics, or rather, physiology, as applied to the whole universe: they envisaged the end of man and the dying out of this sphere.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#69. Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#70. This Second Century appeals to me because it was the last century, for a very long period of time, in which men could think and express themselves with full freedom. As for us, we are perhaps already very far from such times as that.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#71. One night (I was eleven years old at the time) he came and shook me from my sleep and announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed to predict a good harvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#72. The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#73. Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#75. This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
Marguerite Yourcenar
#76. Every new increase in the vast imperial organism seemed to me an unsound growth, like a cancer or dropsical edema which would eventually cause our death.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#77. I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#78. One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#79. It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#80. Friendship affords total certitude above all and that is what distinguishes it from love. It means respect as well and total acceptance of another being.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#81. But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#83. A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#85. I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#86. Everything that we do affects our fate for better or for worse. The circumstances into which we are born also exert a tremendous influence; we come into the world with debits and credits for which we are not responsible already posted to our account: this teaches us humility.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#87. I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#88. All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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