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Any truth creates a scandal.

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
Creates
Truth
Scandal

More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

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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.
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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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I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily
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Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.
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I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
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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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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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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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A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
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Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
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Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
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Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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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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
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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
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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.
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
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Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.
Marguerite Yourcenar