Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

Se, per miracolo, qualche secolo venisse aggiunto ai pochi giorni che mi restano, rifarei le stesse cose, persino gli stessi errori, frequenterei gli stessi Olimpi e i medesimi Inferi.

I lent only half an ear to those well-intentioned folk who say that happiness is enervating, liberty too relaxing, and that kindness is a corruption for those upon whom it is practiced. That may be; but in the world as it is, such reasoning amounts to a refusal to nourish a starving man decently, for fear that in a few years he may suffer from overfeeding. When useless servitude has been alleviated as far as possible, and unnecessary misfortune avoided, there will remain as a test of man’s fortitude that long series of veritable ills, death, old age, and incurable sickness, love unrequited and friendship rejected or betrayed, the mediocrity of a life less vast than our projects and duller than our dreams; in short, all the woes caused by the divine nature of things.

But this practice [vegetarianism], in which youthful love of austerity finds charm, calls for attentions more complicated than those of culinary refinement itself; and it separates us too much from the common run of men in a function which is nearly always public, and in which either friendship or formality presides.

I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.

Keinginan telah mengajarkan kepadamu betapa sia-sianya keinginan, penyesalan mengajarkan betapa sia-sianya penyesalan. Bersabarlah wahai kekeliruan, karena kami semua menjadi bagianmu. Bersabarlah wahai Ketidaksempurnaan, berkat engkaulah Kesempurnaan menyadari dirinya. Bersabarlah kemarahan, karena engkau tidak kekal abadi.

It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters.

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.

Ce qui nous rassure du sommeil, c'est qu'on en sort, et qu'on en sort inchangé, puisqu'une interdiction bizarre nous empêche de rapporter avec nous l'exact résidu de nos songes.

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.

He, too, had dreamed dreams. Folk are usually content to draw from such visions portents which sometimes prove true, since they reveal the sleeper's secrets; but he surmised that these games the mind plays when left to itself can indicate to us chiefly the way in which the soul perceives things. Accordingly, he sought to enumerate the qualities of substance as seen in dream: lightness, impalpability, incoherence, total liberty with regard to time; then, the mobility of forms which allows each person in this state to be several people, and the several to reduce themselves to one; last, the sense of something akin to Platonic reminiscence, but also the almost insupportable feeling of necessity. Such phantom categories strongly resemble what Hermetists clam to know of existence beyond the grave, as if the world of death were only continuing for the soul the awesome world of night.

One night (I was eleven years old at the time) he came and shook me from my sleep and announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed to predict a good harvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world.

On peut dire que tout est prédestiné, que tout est un arrangement extrêmement savant dont nous ne voyons qu'une toute petite partie. On peut dire aussi que tout est chaos, et je me heurterai à ce dilemme jusqu'au bout. (p. 166)

No sabía que el dolor contiene extraños laberintos por los cuales no había terminado de andar

...aveva dovuto credersi amato ben poco per non sentire che perderlo sarebbe stato per me il peggiore dei mali.

Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle our soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy. …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 that same law which ordained 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.