Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.

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

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

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

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
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