Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes - Page 2

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• Ancient and oriental civilizations were more sensitive than we are to the cycles of things; to the succession of generations, both divine and human; and to change within stasis. Western man is virtually alone in wanting to make his God into a fortress and personal immortality into a bulwark against time.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Men, Civilization, Generations

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Faithful, Soul

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”, New York, Farrar

  24 Copy quote

• Books are not life, only its ashes.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Book, Ashes

  12 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Love Is, Discovery, Not Sure

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”

  7 Copy quote

• No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Eternity, Existence

  9 Copy quote

• When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is too complex.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Science, Reality, Ideas

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Mind, Alchemist, Prejudice

  "The Abyss". Book by Marguerite Yourcenar, Author's note, p. 367, 1968.

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Voice, Appreciate, Taught

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”

  19 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Music, Art, Way

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  Passion, Thinking, People

  Marguerite Yourcenar, Matthieu Galey (1984). “With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey”, Boston : Beacon Press

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Love Life, Past

  9 Copy quote

• I don't think I ever relinquish a person I have known, and surely not my fictional characters. I see them, I hear them, with a clarity that I would call hallucinatory if hallucination didn't mean something else ... A character whom we create can never die, any more than a friend can die ... Through [my characters] I've lived many parallel lives.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Character, Mean, Thinking

  14 Copy quote

• nothing is slower than the true birth of a man

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Men, Hadrian, Birth

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”, New York, Farrar

  15 Copy quote

• Translating is writing.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Writing, Translate

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Law, Different

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1957). “Hadrian's Memoirs”

  12 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Truth, Honesty, Lying

  Quoted in the New York Times, 5 May 1980.

  13 Copy quote

• Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Mistake, Yield, Suffering

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1957). “Hadrian's Memoirs”

  8 Copy quote

• Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Mean, Men, Law

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Expression, Choices

  13 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Special, Hours, Duty

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Desire, Technique, Watches

  14 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Heart, World, May

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1984). “The Abyss”, Nuffield, Oxon : Aidan Ellis

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, School, Hadrian

  Marguerite Yourcenar (1954). “Memoirs of Hadrian”, New York, Farrar

  23 Copy quote

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

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Luxury, Drug, Racing

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Education, Children, Home

  Marguerite Yourcenar, Matthieu Galey (1984). “With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey”, Boston : Beacon Press

  9 Copy quote

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