Marguerite Yourcenar

“Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or to change it,…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...

— Marguerite Yourcenar

A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“To eat fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“ A amizade é, acima de tudo, certeza - é isso o que a distingue do amor.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Quel bel levriero... si distese sulla mia vita (Memorie di Adriano, Saeculum Aureum)”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress,…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“But this practice [vegetarianism], in which youthful love of austerity finds charm, calls for attentions more complicated than those of culinary refinement…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Once I had thought chiefly of the man of letters, the traveler, the poet, the lover; none of that had faded, to…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Un hombre que lee, que piensa o que calcula, pertenece a la especie y no al sexo; en sus mejores momentos llega…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it,…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or…

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Books are not life, only its ashes.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“...that imperial guard which poets and humanists mount in relay around any great memory.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar