Quote

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

Marguerite Yourcenar

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Sure
Love
Exquisite
Necessarily
Discovery
Poetry

More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

Image
Want of passion is, I think, a very striking characteristic of Americans, not unrelated to their predilection for violence. For very few people truly have a passionate desire to achieve, and violence serves as a kind of substitute.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
Every invalid is a prisoner.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
All happiness is a form of innocence.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
Books are not life, only its ashes.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
I could say that all my books were conceived by the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writers—the emotional storage is done very early on.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
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
Image
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Image
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