{"author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar","total_quotes":29,"quotes":[{"text":"I lent only half an ear to those well-intentioned folk who say that happiness is enervating, liberty too relaxing, and that kindness is a corruption for those upon whom it is practiced. That may be; but in the world as it is, such reasoning amounts to a refusal to nourish a starving man decently, for fear that in a few years he may suffer from overfeeding. When useless servitude has been alleviated as far as possible, and unnecessary misfortune avoided, there will remain as a test of man’s fortitude that long series of veritable ills, death, old age, and incurable sickness, love unrequited and friendship rejected or betrayed, the mediocrity of a life less vast than our projects and duller than our dreams; in short, all the woes caused by the divine nature of things.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["kindness","liberty","life"],"id":1775,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"More sensitive to Rome's prejudices than I was aware, I recalled that although they grant sensuality a rôle they see only shameful folly in love;.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["love","sensuality","shame"],"id":37121,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["evil","existence","existentialism","futility","history","time","war"],"id":55128,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["adversity"],"id":88779,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"It is not by blood, anyhow, that man's true continuity is established: Alexander's direct heir is Caesar, and not the frail infant born of a Persian princess in an Asiatic citadel; Epaminondas, dying without issue, was right to boast that he had Victories for daughters.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["blood","continuity","family","heir","succession"],"id":107589,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["pessimism","philosophy"],"id":118116,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"Overhead shone the great star of the constellation of Lyra, destined to be the polar star for men who will live tens of thousands of years after we have ceased to be.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["hadrian","life","rome","stars"],"id":148006,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"It displeases me to have some creature think that he can foresee and profit from my desire, automatically adapting himself to what he supposes to be my taste.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["desire"],"id":195108,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"Any law too often subject to infraction is bad; it is the duty of the legislator to repeal or to change it, lest the contempt into which that rash ruling has fallen should extend to other, more just legislation.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["law"],"id":202800,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"},{"text":"I was glad that our venerable, almost formless religions, drained of all intransigence and purged of savage rites, linked us mysteriously to the most ancient secrets of man and of earth, not forbidding us, however, a secular explanation of facts and a rational view of human conduct.","author":"Marguerite Yourcenar","tags":["law","religion"],"id":212463,"author_id":"Marguerite+Yourcenar"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":29,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}