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All happiness is a form of innocence.

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
Innocence
Happiness
Form

More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

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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.
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Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.
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Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
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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.
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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.
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I have come to think that great men are characterized precisely by the extreme position which they take, and that their heroism consists in holding to that extremity throughout their lives.
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Books are not life, only its ashes.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.
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Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.
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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.
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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.
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Translating is writing.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.
Marguerite Yourcenar
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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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