Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)
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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.
Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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