Marguerite Yourcenar quotes
1903 – 1987 · France/Belgium, 20th century · novelist, essayist, poet, translator and literary critic
About Marguerite Yourcenar
Born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour on 8 June 1903 in Brussels, she published from 1921 and moved to the United States in 1939. She became a U.S. citizen in 1947 and lived on Mount Desert Island, Maine, with Grace Frick. Elected to the Académie Française in 1980, she died in Maine in 1987. Her work combines historical reconstruction, philosophical reflection, and a classical style.
Works: Le Jardin des Chimères; Memoirs of Hadrian; The Abyss (L’Œuvre au noir); Archives du Nord
Quotes
“I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily.”
Source: The Abyss (L'Œuvre au noir), 1968 · Check the source
Verified attributionWhat we know
- What is documented
- The sentence appears in L’Œuvre au noir (The Abyss) as part of Zénon’s reflection on intellectual honesty.
- What remains uncertain
- Attribution to Marguerite Yourcenar is verified; the supplied English wording is a translation rather than the original French phrasing.
The line insists that intellectual integrity means refusing to make reality palatable by tacking on lies: Yourcenar’s image shows that altering a fact to ease digestion corrupts thought. In The Abyss the metaphor ties moral clarity to the hard work of examining one’s beliefs.