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

Marguerite Yourcenar

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Marguerite Yourcenar
Age: 84 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 7
Died: 1987
Died: December 17
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brussels
Belgium
Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour
Yourcenar
Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour
Marguerite de Crayencour
Thought
Doe
Everything
Without
Self
Profit
Valuable
Turns

More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

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Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
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A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
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Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.
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The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
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Every invalid is a prisoner.
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Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
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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.
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No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
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I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily
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Books are not life, only its ashes.
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the press is too often a distorting mirror, which deforms the people and events it represents, making them seem bigger or smaller than they really are.
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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
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A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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