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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.
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
Full
Bigs
May
Human
Humans
Perchance
Heart
Expand
Life
Measure
World
Please
More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar
A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
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
Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
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
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
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
No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Any truth creates a scandal.
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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Translating is writing.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Every invalid is a prisoner.
Marguerite Yourcenar
A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
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
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
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
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
