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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
Everything
Without
Self
Profit
Valuable
Turns
Thought
Doe

More quotes by 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.
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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
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Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.
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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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Every invalid is a prisoner.
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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.
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No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
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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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age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
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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.
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Translating is writing.
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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.
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The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.
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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
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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.
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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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Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
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Any truth creates a scandal.
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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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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.
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