Quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

“Every invalid is a prisoner”

“A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.”

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

“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.”

“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 complex.”

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

“[*] Memoirs of Hadrian ... Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.”

Of all our games, loves 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?

Tout bonheur est un chef-doeuvre: la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre hésitation laltère, la moindre lourder le dépare, la moindre sottise labêtit.

Le souvenir nest quun regard posé de temps en temps sur des êtres devenus intérieurs,mais qui ne dépendent pas de la mémoire pour continuer dexister.

Happiness is a masterpiece: the slightest error compromises it, the slightest hesitation undermines it, the slightest excess corrupts it, the slightest vulgarity defiles it.

I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.

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.

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

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

Of all our games, loves play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the bodys ecstasy.

It is not by blood, anyhow, that mans true continuity is established: Alexanders 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.

At that period I paid as constant attention to the greater securing of my happiness, to enjoying and judging it, too, as I had always done for the smallest details of my acts; and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body? Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece; the slightest error turns it awry, and it alters with one touch of doubt; any heaviness detracts from its charm, the least stupidity renders it dull. My own felicity is in no way responsible for those of my imprudences which shattered it later on; in so far as I have acted in harmony with it I have been wise. I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my fathers 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?