186 Quotes by Marguerite Yourcenar

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.

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

No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.