Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

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

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

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

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

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
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
Overhead shone the great star of the constellation of Lyra, destined to be the polar star for men who will live tens of thousands of years after we have ceased to be.

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

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
Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.

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

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

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

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

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