Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
Marguerite Yourcenar
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Mask
Face
Faces
Comes
Inspirational
Given
Time
More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
Marguerite Yourcenar
I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
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
Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
Marguerite Yourcenar
No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
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
The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.
Marguerite Yourcenar
A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
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.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
Marguerite Yourcenar
This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
Marguerite Yourcenar
Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.
Marguerite Yourcenar