André Maurois: Trending quotes (page 7)

“Knowledge is ours only if, at the moment of need, it offers itself to the mind without syllogisms or demonstrations for which there is no time.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Thinking

Knowledge , Time

“There are very few men who do not reckon the cost to themselves of a system of taxes before approving it.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Men

“There is no absurdity or contradiction to which passion may not lead a man. When love or hate takes control, reason must submit and then discover justifications for their folly.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Love , Hate , Passion

“One of the most serious obstacles to happiness is the awkwardness of modern man, with his mind full of doctrines and abstract formulas, when he attempts to re-establish contact with real emotions. Animals and unsophisticated people achieve happiness more naturally, because their desires are simpler and truer. Civilized man, a parrot enslaved by his chattering, ceaselessly inoculates himself with loves and hatreds which he does not actually fee.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness

Love , People , Nature , Animals

“Writing should never be allowed to become a substitute for living. Style cannot breath in a void. It should not be forgotten that Dickens was at one time a reporter, Balzac a lawyer's clerk and Tchekov a county doctor. Art is different from life but cannot exist without it.”

André Maurois

The Art of Writing

Life , Art , Time

“One can love a real woman after having loved her imagined counterpart. Similarly, one can adapt oneself to a society which, previously, one held in contempt.”

André Maurois

The Art of Writing

Love , Imagination

“Between a man and a woman, collaboration and admiration are more natural than competition. The woman accepts the secondary role willingly; she gives the man what he needs in the way of courage and moral support.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Way , Courage , Support , Nature

“The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.”

André Maurois

The Art of Writing

“Style is the outcome of constraint.”

André Maurois

The Art of Writing

“It is a fairly consistent law of humanity that men spend about half their lives at war. A Frenchman, called Lapouge, calculated that from the year 1100 to the year 1500, England had been 207 years at war and 212 years from 1500 to 1900. In France the corresponding figures would be 192 and 181 years. According to that same man Lapouge, nineteen million men are killed in war every century. Their blood would fill three million barrels of 180 liters each, and would feed a fountain of blood running 700 liters an hour from the beginning of history.”

André Maurois

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Men , War , Law , History

“The love of humanity is a pathological state of a sexual origin which often appears at the age of puberty in nervous and clever people. The excess of phosphorus in the system must get out somewhere. As for hatred of a tyrant, that is a more human sentiment which has full play in time of war, when force and the mob are one. Emperors must be mad fools to decide on declaring wars which substitute an armed nation for their Praetorian Guards. That idiocy accomplished, despotism of course produces revolution until terrorism leads to the inevitable reaction.”

André Maurois

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Love , War , People , Age

“Stupidity is a factor to be reckoned with in human affairs. The true leader always expects to encounter it, and prepares to endure it patiently so long as it is normal stupidity. He knows that his ideas will be distorted, his orders carelessly executed; and that there will be jealousy among his assistants. He takes these inevitable phenomena into account, and instead of attempting to find men without faults, who are non-existent, he tries to make use of the best men at his disposal - as they are, and not as they ought to be.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Men , Stupidity , Jealousy , Idea

“The cinema may have a specific beauty of its own, but it does not permit that constant re-reading, that meditative brooding, those turning-back to passages heavily charged with meaning, which form the special pleasure of the novel-reader.”

André Maurois

The Art of Writing

Pleasure , Beauty , Reading

“Byron says that it is easier to die for the woman one loves than to live with her.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Love

“A leader should have a quick intelligence. Time is a factor in all action. An imperfect scheme put into action at the proper time is better than a perfect one accomplished too late. Sometimes time is so important that it becomes the principal consideration.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Intelligence , Time , Perfection

“Revolt against a tyrant is legitimate; it can succeed. Revolt against human nature is doomed to failure.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Failure , Nature

“There are very few really brilliant men who have not had at least one madman among their ancestors.”

André Maurois

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Men

“The truth seems to be that monogamous marriage, mitigated in certain countries by divorce and in certain other by tolerance of infidelity, persists in our Western civilization as the solution which entails the least suffering for the greatest number of people.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Marriage , People , Truth , Suffering

“A leader's intelligence must have simplicity and clarity; action is difficult when the mind is full of complex theories and schemes. An over-organized industry wastes just as much money as one without organization - the transmission uses up all the motor's power. (For this reason small enterprises directed by one man have the better of larger trusts because their costs are less and the quality of their product higher.) A leader must have a few very simple ideas, acquired from experience and confirmed by putting them into practice. This structure created by experience will contain much exact knowledge for use in connection with a given action.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Money , Intelligence , Idea , Knowledge

“Choose a community to live in whose efforts lie in the same direction as your own and where there will be interest in your activities. Instead of living in conflict with your family, who in your opinion do not understand you, and in the conflict destroying your happiness and that of others, seek out friends who think as you do. If you are religious, live among believers; if you are a revolutionary, live among your own kind. You can still try to convince the skeptical, and in this you will have the support of those who are in agreement with you.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness

Lie , Family , Communication , Understanding