Quotes from Marguerite Yourcenar

Any truth creates a scandal.

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.

Every invalid is a prisoner.

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.

And nevertheless I have loved certain of my masters, and those strangely intimate though elusive relations existing between student and teacher, and the Sirens singing somewhere within the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.

La vie est atroce ; nous savons cela. Mais précisément parce que j'attends peu de choses de la condition humaine, les périodes de bonheur, les progrès partiels, les efforts de recommencement, et de continuité me semblent autant de prodiges qui compensent presque l'immense masse des maux, des échecs, de l'incurie et de l'erreur.

Do not mistake me. I am not yet weak enough to yield to fearful imaginings, which are almost as absurd as illusions of hope, and are certainly harder to bear. If I must deceive myself, I should prefer to stay on the side of confidence, for I shall lose no more there and shall suffer less.

the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end.

The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead…

Mucho me costaría vivir en un mundo sin libros pero la realidad no está en ellos, puesto que no cabe entera.

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father's life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?

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

Il vero luogo natio è quello dove per la prima volta si è posato uno sguardo consapevole su se stessi: la mia prima patria sono stati i libri.

Water drunk more reverently still, from the hands or from the spring itself, diffuses within us the most secret salt of earth and the rain of heaven.

La mémoire de la plupart des hommes est un cimetière abandonné, où gisent sans honneurs des morts qu'ils ont cessé de chérir. Toute douleur prolongée insulte à leur oubli.

Le souvenir n'est qu'un regard posé de temps en temps sur des êtres devenus intérieurs,mais qui ne dépendent pas de la mémoire pour continuer d'exister.

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit.

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

Books are not life, only its ashes.

Il segreto più profondo di Olimpia è racchiuso in quest'unica nota cristallina: lottare è un gioco, vivere è un gioco, morire è un gioco; profitti e perdite non sono che distinzioni passeggere, ma il gioco pretende tutte le nostre forze, e la sorte accetta, come posta, unicamente i nostri cuori.

From each art practiced in its time I derive a knowledge which compensates me in part for pleasures lost. I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such sympathy would be one of the least revocable kinds of immortality.

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

To eat fruit is to welcome into oneself a fair living object, which is alien to us but is nourished and protected like us by earth; it is to consume a sacrifice wherein we sustain ourselves at the expense of things.

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.