Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

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

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again ... Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes ...”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Leaving behind books is even more beautiful - there are far too many children.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory. Translation by David Downie”

— 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

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

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of the same law which ordains that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Books are not life, only its ashes.”

— 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

“We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father's life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“But this practice [vegetarianism], in which youthful love of austerity finds charm, calls for attentions more complicated than those of culinary refinement itself; and it separates us too much from the common run of men in a function which is nearly always public, and in which either friendship or formality presides.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Water drunk more reverently still, from the hands or from the spring itself, diffuses within us the most secret salt of earth and the rain of heaven.”

— 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. I strive to retrace my life to find in it some plan, following a vein of lead, or of gold, or the course of some subterranean stream, but such devices are only tricks of perspective in the memory.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“I lent only half an ear to those well-intentioned folk who say that happiness is enervating, liberty too relaxing, and that kindness is a corruption for those upon whom it is practiced. That may be; but in the world as it is, such reasoning amounts to a refusal to nourish a starving man decently, for fear that in a few years he may suffer from overfeeding. When useless servitude has been alleviated as far as possible, and unnecessary misfortune avoided, there will remain as a test of man's fortitude that long series of veritable ills, death, old age, and incurable sickness, love unrequited and friendship rejected or betrayed, the mediocrity of a life less vast than our projects and duller than our dreams; in short, all the woes caused by the divine nature of things.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

It is not that I despise men. If I did I should have no right, and no reason, to try to govern.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“And I reminded myself that the reproach of intellectualism is often directed at the most sensitive natures, those most ardently alive, those obliged by their frailty or their excess of strength constantly to resort to the arduous disciplines of the mind.”

— 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

“It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Suffering turns us into egotists, for it absorbs us completely: it is later, in the form of memory, that it teaches us compassion.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

Chabrias, ever preoccupied to offer the gods the worship due them, was disturbed by the progress of sects of this kind among the populace of large cities; he feared for the welfare of our ancient religions, which yoke men to no dogma whatsoever, but lend themselves, on the contrary, to interpretations as varied as nature itself; they allow austere spirits who desire to do so to invent for themselves a higher morality, but they do not bind the masses to precepts so strict as to engender immediate constraint and hypocrisy.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Any happiness is a masterpiece.”

— 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

Aveva dovuto credersi amato ben poco per non sentire che perderlo sarebbe stato per me il peggiore dei mali.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or to change it, lest the contempt into which that rash ruling has fallen should extend to other, more just legislation.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

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

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels or the abysses that it contains, or the line that seems to have been written for me alone. In this respect the writer is not different from any other human being: whatever we say or do can have far-reaching consequences.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

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

— 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

“Translating is writing.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others ...”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

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

— 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

“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

“Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

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

— 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

There are stages in bread-making quite similar to the stages of writing. You begin with something shapeless, which sticks to your fingers, a kind of paste. Gradually that paste becomes more and more firm. Then there comes a point when it turns rubbery. Finally, you sense that the yeast has begun to do its work: the dough is alive. Then all you have to do is let it rest. But in the case of a book the work may take ten years.

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“[On travel:] Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?”

— 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

“Any truth creates a scandal.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

“The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar