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Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar,

Q U O T E S :

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; myfirst homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”

“Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...”

“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.”

“nothing is slower than the true birth of a man”

“There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.”

“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.”

“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 somewherewithin the cracked voice of him who is first to reveal a new idea. The greatest seducer was not

Alcibiades, afterall, it was Socrates.”

“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.”

“Little soul, gentle and drifting, guest and companion of my body, now you will dwell belowin pallid places, stark and bare; there you will abandon your play of yore. But one moment

still, let us gaze together on these familiar shores, on these objects which doubtless we shall

not see again....Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes...”

“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.”

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“But even the longest dedication is too short and too commonplace to honor a friendship so

uncommon. When I try to define this asset which has been mine now for years, I tell myself 

that such a privilege, however rare it may be, is surely not unique; that in the whole adventure

of bringing a book successfully to its conclusion, or even in the entire life of some fortunate

writers, there must have been sometimes, in the background, perhaps, someone who will not

let pass the weak or inaccurate sentence which we ourselves would retain, out of fatigue;someone who would re-read with us for the twentieth time, if need be, a questionable page;

someone who takes down for us from the library shelves the heavy tomes in which we may

find a helpful suggestion, and who persists in continuing to peruse them long after weariness

has made us give up; someone who bolsters our courage and approves, or sometimes disputes,

our ideas; who shares with us, and with equal fervor, the joys of art and of living, the endless

work which both require, never easy but never dull; someone who is neither our shadow nor 

our reflection, nor even our complement, but simply himself; someone who leaves us ideally

free, but who nevertheless obliges us to be fully what we are. Hospes Comesque.”

“One night (I was eleven years old at the time) he came and shook me from my sleep and

announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed to predict a goodharvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world.”

“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.”

“Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more

easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will

have enriched not my life but my death.

...

Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that

tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without

changing the fact that he had been.”

“This Second Century appeals to me because it was the last century, for a very long period of 

time, in which men could think and express themselves with full freedom. As for us, we are

 perhaps already very far from such times as that.”

“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.”

“Laws change more slowly than custom, and though dangerous when they fall behind the

times are more dangerous still when the presume to anticipate custom.”

― Marguerite Yourcenar , Memoirs of Hadrian 

“But this practice [vegetarianism], in which youthful love of austerity finds charm, calls for 

attentions more complicated than those of culinary refinement itself; and it separates us too

much from the common run of men in a function which is nearly always public, and in which

either friendship or formality presides.”

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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…”

“I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of 

 poetry.”

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

“That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to a love of an entire person has

seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life.”

“Those sages of the ancient world, unbound by dogma of any kind, thought as we do in terms

of physics, or rather, physiology, as applied to the whole universe: they envisaged the end of 

man and the dying out of this sphere.”

“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.”

“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.”