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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.

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
Morality
Private
Concern
Public
Moral
Matter
Decency
Morals
Agreement

More quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

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If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory. Translation by David Downie
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The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself
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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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This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?
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Every invalid is a prisoner.
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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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Any truth creates a scandal.
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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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Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
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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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Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books.
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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 is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
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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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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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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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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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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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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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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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