The Discovery of Poetry

…I’m not sure that the discovery of love would be necessarily more delicious than that of poetry.

Memoirs of Hadrian

VAIRUS MILTIPLEX MULTIFORMIS

Margerite Yourcenar

Fire and Philosophy

To study it in all it's purity, philosophers make reality suffer almost the same transformations that fire or the mortar make bodies suffer; in these crystals or in these ashes nothing seems to subsist to be or act as we know. […] It would be very difficult for me to live in a world without books, but reality is not in them, since it wouldn’t entirely fit on them.

Memoirs of Hadrian

ANIMULA VAGULA BLANDULA

Marguerite Yourcenar

Man and Horses

The relationship between Boristhenes and me was one of mathematical precision: he obeyed me as if I were his brain, not his master. Did I ever succeed in making a man do the same thing? […] My horse replaced the thousand notions related to the title, the function and the name, which turn human friendship into something complicated, by the only knowledge of my exact weight of man.

Memoirs of Hadrian
ANIMA VAGULA BLANDULA
Marguerite Yourcenar