Top 100 Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

2. “A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

3. “Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

4. “Translating is writing.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

5. “Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

6. “Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

7. “There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

8. “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

9. “I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

10. “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

11. “Every invalid is a prisoner.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

12. “All happiness is a form of innocence.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

13. “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

14. “I believe that friendship, like love, of which it is a particular kind, requires nearly as much art as a successful choreography.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

15. “To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

16. “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

17. “Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

18. “The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

19. “All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

20. “Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

21. “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.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

22. “In the evenings the art of building gave way to that of music, which is architecture, too, though invisible.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

23. “We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

24. “This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

25. “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.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

26. “I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

27. “I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

28. “I will not fall. I have reached the center. I listen to the striking of who knows what divine clock through the thin carnal wall of a life full of blood, of shudderings, and of breathings. I am near the mysterious kernel of things as one is sometimes near a heart at night.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

29. “Any truth creates a scandal.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

30. “Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell below in pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall not see again... Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

31. “Books are not life, only its ashes.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

32. “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.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

33. “Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others...”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

34. “One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

35. “Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

36. “I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

37. “On the whole, however, it is only out of pride or gross ignorance, or cowardice, that we refuse to see in the present the lineaments of times to come.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

38. “I have no children, nor is that a regret. To be sure, in time of weakness and fatigue, when one lacks the courage of one’s convictions, I have sometimes reproached myself for not having taken the precaution to engender a son, to follow me. But such a vain regret rests upon two hypotheses, equally doubtful: first, that a son necessarily continues us, and second, that the strange mixture of good and evil, that mass of minute and odd particularities which make up a person, deserves continuation.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

39. “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

40. “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. On the other hand, but more slowly, life has thrown light for me on the meaning of books.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

41. “Overhead shone the great star of the constellation of Lyra, destined to be the polar star for men who will live tens of thousands of years after we have ceased to be.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

42. “Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of the same law which ordains that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

43. “It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

44. “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

45. “I did not love less; indeed I loved more. But the weight of love, like that of an arm thrown tenderly across a chest, becomes little by little too heavy to bear.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

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

— Marguerite Yourcenar

47. “But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don’t destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

48. “The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

49. “For me, a poet is someone who is ‘in contact.’ Someone through whom a current is passing.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

50. “Any happiness is a masterpiece.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar