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Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others.
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
Hour
Duty
Special
Hours
Others
Every
Injunction
Dominates
Immediate
More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar
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
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
A being afire with life cannot foresee death in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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
I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily
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
Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the times are more dangerous still when they presume to anticipate custom.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
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
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
Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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.
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
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
I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Books are not life, only its ashes.
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
