Marguerite Yourcenar Quotes

You have to hold onto your fantasy.

It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.

No man is beaten until his hope is annihilated, his confidence gone, As long as a man faces life hopefully, confidently, triumphantly, he is not a failure; he is not beaten until he turns his back on life.

If you believe, then you hang on. If you believe, it means you've got imagination, you don't need stuff thrown out on a blueprint, and don't face facts-what can stop you? If I don't make it today, I'll come in tomorrow.

I think that hope is the act of continuing in the face of the truth.

My friends, whoever has had experience of evils knows how whenever a flood of ills comes upon mortals, a man fears everything; but whenever a divine force cheers on our voyage, then we believe that the same fate will always blow fair.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

I think faith is vitally important to your day, your seconds in each day. Faith helps to get you through the day.

Do not look upon this world with fear and loathing. Bravely face whatever the gods offer.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

Fear is a very explosive emotion, but it has a short life span. It's the sprint. The marathon is hope.

Believing you're something that you're not excites the mind and the imagination. And it's hopeful.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear and superstition.

The desperate things seem to require attention, the lovely things seem to elicit celebration. If I had to choose, I would go to the awful in the hope that doing something could yield a happier result.

Comedy is defiance. It's a snort of contempt in the face of fear and anxiety. And it's the laughter that allows hope to creep back on the inhale.

The most important thing when ill is to never lose heart.

We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

A lot of tragedy can befall us, but there's always something else; there's always hope.

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

One day, you might look up and see me playing the game at 50. Don't laugh. Never say never, because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.

There are no guarantees. From the viewpoint of fear, none are strong enough. From the viewpoint of love, none are necessary.