All happiness is a form of innocence.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stu…

- Marguerite Yourcenar

To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

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.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.

- Marguerite Yourcenar

For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free…

- Marguerite Yourcenar

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, gi…

- Marguerite Yourcenar