Memoirs of Hadrian

I recently finished the book Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar.
It's an interesting book in which the narrator (who actually existed) is the Roman emperor Hadrian. In the book he recounts his life to his successor, (all the events are historically based), but what makes the book extraordinary is the philosophical commentary Yourcenar scatters throughout the novel. I was writing down quotes which I marked down while reading for an English report, and I decided to post some of my favorites here too. This is a very small amount of what I underlined, highlighted etc.

It's a great book, highly recommended if you want a philosophy fix, but not highly recommended if you're looking for a very intense plot-line.

Quotes:
"Thus from each art practiced in its time I derive a knowledge which compensates me in part for pleasures lost. I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such sympathy would be one of the least revocable kinds of immortality. There have been moments when that comprehension tried to go beyond human experience, passing from the swimmer to the wave. But in such a realm, since there is nothing exact left to guide me, I verge upon the world of dream and metamorphosis" (7).

"Like eveyrone else iH ave at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmn, who usually arrange to hide their secrets from us, or to make us believe that they have secrets where none exist; and books, with the particular errors of perspective to which they inevitably give rise" (21).

"The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself;" (33).

"...I have little faith in laws. If too severe, they are broken, and with good reason. If too complicated, human ingenuity finds means to slip easily between the meshes of this trailing but fragile net" (113).

"Wisdom, if I understand it at all, consists of admitting each of such possibilities and dangers, which make up life itself, while trying to ward off the worst" (173).

"...yet I was hurrying, as if each one of those hours was the most beautiful, but also the last of all" (180).

"It was one more thrust agaisnt time: a name, a life sum (of which the inumerable elements would never be known), a mere mark left by a man wholly lost in that succession of centuries" (203).

"Death is hideous, but life is too" (205).

"...the god did not take the place of the living being I had lost" (208).

"I marveled that its beauty depended so little upon memories, whether my own or those of history; that city seemed new with each new day" (216).

"I warned myself that it would take only a few wards, and the misery that follows them , or a single period of brutality or savergery under a few bad rulers to destroy forever the ideas passed down with the help of these frail objects in fiber and ink" (217).

"A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate...our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else, woudl perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man" (243).

"Natura deficit, fortuna mutatur, deus omina cernit. Nature fails us, fortune changes, a god beholds all things from on high:" (243).

"nature prefers to start again from the veyr clay, from chaos itself, and this horrible waste is what we term natural order" (244).

"I was reaching the age when each beauteous place recalls another, fairer still, when each delight is weighted with the memory of past joys. I was willing to yield to nostalgia, that melancholy residue of desire" (252).

"But bonds of blood are truly slight when they are not reinforced by affection;" (261).

"I have compensated for this premature death as well as I could; an image, a reflection, some feeble echo will survive for at least a few centuries. Little more can be done in matters of immortality" (287).

"Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods of war; the words humanity, liberty, and justice will here and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and other pediments will arise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermitent immoratlity" (293).

"Let us try, if we can, to enter into death with open eyes..." (295).