186 Quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...

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.

Life was to me a horse to whose motion one yields, but only after having trained theanimal to the utmost.

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

Tout bonheur est un chef-d'oeuvre: la moindre erreur le fausse, la moindre hésitation l'altère, la moindre lourder le dépare, la moindre sottise l'abêtit.

Sometimes one controls one's acts; one controls less often one's thoughts; one never controls one's dreams. I had dreams.

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

Il se servait de son esprit comme d'un coin pour élargir de son mieux les interstices du mur qui de toute part nous confine. Les failles grandissaient, ou plutôt le mur, semblait-il, perdait de lui-même sa solidité sans pour autant cesser d'être opaque, comme s'il s'agissait d'une muraille de fumée au lieu d'une muraille de pierre.(L'abîme)

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.