Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

All happiness is a form of innocence.

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

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.

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

Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of having known the person who has passed away. Somehow our world rebuilds itself after every death, and in any case we know that none of us will last forever. So you might say that life and death lead us by the hand, firmly but tenderly.

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.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.