186 Quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

The world is big … May it please the One who perchance is to expand the human heart to life's full measure.

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.

nothing is slower than the true birth of a man

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.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

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.

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.

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.

If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory." Translation by David Downie