Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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
I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily.

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

Marguerite Yourcenar
Leisure moments: each life well regulated has some such intervals, and he who cannot make way for them does not know how to live.

Marguerite Yourcenar
The writer must soak up the subject completely, as a plant soaks up water, until the ideas are ready to sprout.

Marguerite Yourcenar
A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.

Marguerite Yourcenar
It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.

Marguerite Yourcenar
The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece: the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or change it.

Marguerite Yourcenar
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
Human beings betray their worst failings when they marvel to find that a world ruler is neither foolishly indolent, presumptuous, nor cruel.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Passion satisfied has its innocence, almost as fragile as any other.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...

Marguerite Yourcenar
For me, a poet is someone who is in contact. Someone through whom a current is passing.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Every silence is composed of nothing but unspoken words. Perhaps that is why I became a musician. Someone had to express this silence, make it render up all the sadness it contained, make it sing as it were. Someone had to use not words, which are always too precise not to be cruel, but simply music.

Marguerite Yourcenar
One must not fear the words anymore when one consented to the things.

Marguerite Yourcenar
The unfortunate thing is that, because wishes sometimes come true, the agony of hoping is perpetuated.

Marguerite Yourcenar
And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.

Marguerite Yourcenar
A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.

Marguerite Yourcenar
I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Our defects are sometimes the better adversaries when we oppose our vices.

Marguerite Yourcenar
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
Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others...

Marguerite Yourcenar
For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free man (all who try that have proved tiresome), but a technique: I hoped to discover the hinge where our will meets and moves with destiny, and where discipline strengthens, instead of restraining, our nature.

Marguerite Yourcenar
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
Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly.

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, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack.

Marguerite Yourcenar