Top 100 Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Everything that we do affects our fate for better or for worse. The circumstances into which we are born also exert a tremendous influence; we come into the world with debits and credits for which we are not responsible already posted to our account: this teaches us humility.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Like everyone else I have at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide secrets where none exist; and books, with the particular errors of perspective to which they inevitably give rise.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

55. “Leaving behind books is even more beautiful – there are far too many children.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

56. “The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

57. “I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like the others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

58. “A part of every life, even a life meriting very little regard, is spent in searching out the reasons for its existence, its starting point, and its source. My own failure to discover these things has sometimes inclined me toward magical explanations, and has led me to seek in the frenzies of the occult for what common sense has not taught me.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

59. “Happiness is a masterpiece: the slightest error compromises it, the slightest hesitation undermines it, the slightest excess corrupts it, the slightest vulgarity defiles it.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

60. “Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

61. “Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

62. “Rien ne m’explique : mes vices et mes vertus n’y suffisent absolument pas ; mon bonheur le fait davantage.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

63. “One is always punished out of season.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

64. “Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

65. “No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

66. “The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up meat attractive to flies.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

67. “The world, which is sometimes too stern, compensates for its harshness with its inattention.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

68. “It is not that I despise men. If I did I should have no right, and no reason, to try to govern.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

69. “Suffering turns us into egotists, for it absorbs us completely: it is later, in the form of memory, that it teaches us compassion.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

70. “A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

71. “Is the soul only the supreme development of the body, the fragile evidence of the pain and pleasure of existing? Is it, on the contrary more ancient than the body, which is modeled on its image and which serves it momentarily, more or less well, as instrument?”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

72. “The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

73. “This Second Century appeals to me because it was the last century, for a very long period of time, in which men could think and express themselves with full freedom. As for us, we are perhaps already very far from such times as that.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

74. “Pero de todos modos he llegado a la edad en que la vida, para cualquier hombre, es una derrota aceptada.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

75. “Nada nos acerca tanto a otros seres como el tener miedo juntos.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

76. “Sobre todo, no se enamora uno de quien se le parece.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

77. “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

78. “Three quarters of our intellectual performances are no more than decorations upon a void; I wondered if that increasing vacuity was due to the lowering of intelligence or to moral decline; whatever the cause, mediocrity of mind was matched almost everywhere by shocking selfishness and dishonesty.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

79. “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.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

80. “A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

81. “And it was at about this time that I began to feel myself divine.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

82. “I think still that someone wiser than I might well have remained happy till his death.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

83. “My purpose was simply to diminish that mass of contradictions and abuses which eventually turn legal procedure into a wilderness where decent people hardly dare venture, and where bandits abound.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

84. “Natura deficit, fortuna mutatur, deus omnia cernit. La naturaleza nos traiciona, la fortuna cambia, un dios mira las cosas desde lo alto.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

85. “All forms of dire poverty and brutality were things to forbid as insults to the fair body of mankind, every injustice a false note to avoid in the harmony of the spheres.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

86. “Every new increase in the vast imperial organism seemed to me an unsound growth, like a cancer or dropsical edema which would eventually cause our death.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

87. “It is difficult to remain an emperor in presence of a physician, and difficult even to keep one’s essential quality as man.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

88. “L’or vierge du respect serait trop mou sans un certain alliage de crainte.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

89. “De herinnering van de meeste mensen is een verlaten kerkhof, waar de doden die ze hebben opgehouden lief te hebben eerloos terneerliggen. Elk langdurig verdriet is een aanklacht tegen hun vergetelheid.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

90. “Los pedantes se irritan siempre de que conozcamos tan bien como ellos su mezquino oficio.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

91. “Maar de menselijke geest accepteert niet graag dat hij afhankelijk is van het toeval, dat hij slechts het voorbijgaande product is van kansen waarover geen enkele god zeggenschap heeft, hijzelf zeker niet.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

92. “De nog in de duistere schoot van de tijd liggende eeuwen zouden bij duizendtallen over dat graf heen gaan zonder hem het bestaan terug te geven, maar ook zonder iets aan zijn dood toe te voegen, zonder te beletten dat hij had geleefd.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

93. “Niettemin ben ik op de leeftijd gekomen waarop het leven voor ieder mens een aanvaarde nederlaag is.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

94. “A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

95. “Ik heb mijn strikt persoonlijke tijdrekening, onmogelijk in overeenstemming te brengen met die welke gebaseerd is op de stichting van Rome of het tijdperk van de Olympiaden. Vijftien jaren in het leger hebben korter geduurd dan een ochtend in Athene; er zijn mensen met wie ik mijn leven lang ben omgegaan en die ik in de Onderwereld niet zou herkennen.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

96. “El verdadero lugar del nacimiento es aquel donde por primera vez nos miramos con una mirada inteligente; mis primeras patrias fueron los libros. Y, en menor grado, las escuelas.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

97. “Ik wist toen nog niet dat de dood voorwerp kan worden van een blinde drang, van een honger zoals de liefde. Ik had niet die nachten voorzien waarin ik mijn riem om mijn dolk zou wikkelen om mezelf te dwingen tweemaal na te denken alvorens mij ervan te bedienen. Alleen Arrianos is doorgedrongen tot het geheim van dat roemloze gevecht tegen de leegte, de dorheid, de vermoeienis, de walging van het bestaan die uitloopt op het verlangen te sterven.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

98. “But experience shows that in spite of our infinite care in choosing our successors the mediocre emperors will always outnumber the wise, and that at least one fool will be reign per century. In time of crisis these bureaus, if well organized, will go on with what must be done, filling the interim between two good rulers. Some emperors like to parade behind them whole lines of barbarians, bound at the neck, those interminable processions of the conquered.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

99. “I often think of the library established by Plotina in Trajan’s Forum, with that noble inscription placed by her order over its door: Dispensary to the Soul.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar

100. “Of all the joys which are slowly abandoning me, sleep is one of the most precious, though one of the most common, too. A man who sleeps but little and poorly, propped on many a cushion, has ample time to meditate upon this particular delight.”

— Marguerite Yourcenar