Marguerite Yourcenar quotes

Marguerite Yourcenar was a French novelist, essayist, and the first woman elected to the Académie Française. Her most famous work is the historical novel "Memoirs of Hadrian," which explores the complexities of power and love. She is celebrated for her erudition, poetic style, and profound insights into the human condition. Here are 43 of her quotes:

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

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

Marguerite Yourcenar

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

Marguerite Yourcenar

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

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

Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.

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

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

Marguerite Yourcenar

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.

Marguerite Yourcenar

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

Marguerite Yourcenar

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.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Every invalid is a prisoner.

Marguerite Yourcenar

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

Marguerite Yourcenar

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.

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

Passion satisfied has its innocence, almost as fragile as any other.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Our defects are sometimes the better adversaries when we oppose our vices.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Our civil laws will never be supple enough to fit the immense and changing variety of facts. Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Leisure moments: each life well regulated has some such intervals, and he who cannot make way for them does not know how to live.

Marguerite Yourcenar

The skirmishes with the theologians had had their charm, but he knew well that no lasting accord exists between those who seek, ponder, and dissect and pride themselves on being capable of thinking tomorrow other than they do today, and those who accept the Faith, or declare that they do, and oblige their fellow men to do the same, on pain of death.

Marguerite Yourcenar

There is more than one kind of wisdom, and all are essential in the world; it is not bad that they should alternate.

Marguerite Yourcenar

All would have transformed us if we had the courage to be what we are.

Marguerite Yourcenar