Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.

Marguerite Yourcenar
If man is part and parcel of the universe, and is ruled by the same laws as govern the sky, it is not unreasonable to search the heavens for the patterns of our lives, and for those impersonal attractions which induce our success and our errors.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Life was to me like a horse to whose motions one yields, but only after having trained the animal to the utmost.

Marguerite Yourcenar
In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.

Marguerite Yourcenar
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
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
Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death.... Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been.

Marguerite Yourcenar
All would have transformed us if we had the courage to be what we are.

Marguerite Yourcenar
I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

Marguerite Yourcenar
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
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
Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?

Marguerite Yourcenar
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.

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
Our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing variety of facts. 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.

Marguerite Yourcenar
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
Few bipeds, from Adam's time down, have been worthy of the name of man.

Marguerite Yourcenar
The skirmishes with the theologians had had their charm, but he knew well that no lasting accord exists between those who seek, ponder, and dissect and pride themselves on being capable of thinking tomorrow other than they do today, and those who accept the Faith, or declare that they do, and oblige their fellow men to do the same, on pain of death.

Marguerite Yourcenar
To have merit to abstain from a fault, is a manner to be guilty.

Marguerite Yourcenar
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
We believe ourselves pure as long as we despise what we do not desire.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Our merchants are sometimes our best geographers, our best astronomers, and our most learned naturalists.

Marguerite Yourcenar
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
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
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
Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.

Marguerite Yourcenar
There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is not bad that they should alternate.

Marguerite Yourcenar
In alchemical treatises, the formula L'Oeuvre au Noir … designates what is said to be the most difficult phase of the alchemist's process, the separation and dissolution of substance. It is still not clear whether the term applied to daring experiments on matter itself, or whether it was understood to symbolize trials of the mind in discarding all forms of routine and prejudice. Doubtless it signified one or the other meaning alternately, or perhaps both at the same time.

Marguerite Yourcenar
Beyond this village, other villages; beyond this abbey, other abbeys; and after the fortress, more fortresses still. And each of these castles of stone and each wooden hut has its structure of fixed ideas or flimsy, ill-based opinions superposed above it within which fools stay immured, but the wise find apertures for escape.

Marguerite Yourcenar