Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.

I often advocate that we look at many sides of an issue, walk in someone else's shoes, and identify and reject false choices.

I thought again how you could never really know what you were seeing with just a glance, in motion, passing by. Good or bad, right or wrong. There was always so much more.

Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy.

We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding.

It is not that I love contradictions: life is contradictory. Existence itself is possible only through contradictions.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. "Once upon a time" is how all the best children's stories begin, and "prostitute" is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let's keep that beginning.

Intelligence is: (a) the most complex phenomenon in the Universe; or (b) a profoundly simple process. The answer, of course, is (c) both of the above. It's another one of those great dualities that make life interesting.

In any case, the idea of giving "all" of reality is overly simple and absurd.

Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

the truth is often a mixed message

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.

Paradoxes are the only truths.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".

There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.

Truth is what most contradicts itself.

Contradiction is the essence of the universe.

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.

It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.

Reality has always had too many heads.

The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true.

I need the binocular approach of science and religion if I am to do any sort of justice to the deep and rich reality of the world in which we live.

When we consider reality itself we quickly become aware of its infinite complexity, and we realize that our habitual perception of it is often inadequate. If this were not so, the concept of deception would be meaningless.