Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

46 quotes in 784 categories

• 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…
• Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.
• To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.
• 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…
• I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
• The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
• 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…
• The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
• A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
• 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…
• Books are not life, only its ashes.
• 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.
• 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…
• It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.
• But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.
• 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…
• Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
• The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite,…
• 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…
• 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…

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