Marguerite Yourcenar - Life Quotes

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

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

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