Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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