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Cruelty is the luxury of those who have nothing to do, like drugs or racing stables.

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
Luxury
Drug
Nothing
Like
Stables
Racing
Cruelty
Drugs

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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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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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Morals are a matter of private agreement decency is of public concern.
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age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.
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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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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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All happiness is a form of innocence.
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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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Any truth creates a scandal.
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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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No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.
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It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.
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Books are not life, only its ashes.
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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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Leaving behind books is even more beautiful — there are far too many children.
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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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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.
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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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Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.
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