Marguerite Yourcenar quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Yourcenar Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Marguerite Yourcenar on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.

Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.

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

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.

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

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

Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.

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

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

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

Any happiness is a masterpiece.

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

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.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.

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

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

For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.

The world, which is sometimes too stern, compensates for its harshness with its inattention.

Translating is writing.

One is always punished out of season.

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

That imperial guard which poets and humanists mount in relay around any great memory.

Every invalid is a prisoner.

Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.

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

And it was at about this time that I began to feel myself divine.

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

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

the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end.

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

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

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.

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit.

A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.

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

I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.

I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.

On the whole, however, it is only out of pride or gross ignorance, or cowardice, that we refuse to see in the present the lineaments of times to come.

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

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

One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.

Attianus had been right in his conjectures: the virgin gold of respect would be too soft without some alloy of fear.

Any truth creates a scandal.

The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up meat attractive to flies.

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

All happiness is a form of innocence.