Marguerite Yourcenar - The Abyss (1968)

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

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

Marguerite Yourcenar