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“The art of resting is a part of the art of working. A man who is tired and greatly in need of rest cannot do any good work. We are all familiar with those terrible mornings after sleepless nights when our brains refuse to function. It would be useless then to attempt to apply the principles of the art of working. Those principles presuppose mind and body to be in good condition. The human organism cannot live without alternating work and rest.”

André Maurois

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

Art , Parting , Night

“There is an excellent rule to follow; quarrel, not with the person who said the things (you can never be sure they were said), but with the person who has told of their being said.”

André Maurois

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

Personality

“Love born of anxiety resembles a thorn shaped so that efforts to pull it out of one's flesh merely cause it to penetrate more deeply therein.”

André Maurois

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

Love , Effort

“Nothing in our daily life will last if neglected; houses, stuffs, friendships, pleasures. Roofs fall in, love comes to an end. A tile needs re-fastening, a joint must be repaired, a misunderstanding cleared up. Otherwise bitterness is created; feelings deep down in the soul become centers of infection, and one day, during a quarrel, the abscess breaks, and each is horrified by the picture of himself or herself discovered in the other's mind.”

André Maurois

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

Love , Life , Friendship , Pleasure

“Conquest brings no lasting happiness unless the person conquered was possessed of free will. Only then can there be doubt and anxiety and those continual victories over habit and boredom which produce the keenest pleasures of all. The comely inmates of the harem are rarely loved, for they are prisoners. Inversely, the far too accessible ladies of present-day seaside resorts almost never inspire love, because they are emancipated. Where is love's victory when there is neither veil, modesty, nor self-respect to check its progress? Excessive freedom raises up the transparent walls of an invisible seraglio to surround these easily acquired ladies. Romantic love requires women, not that they should be inaccessible, but that their lives should be lived within the rather narrow limits of religion and convention. These conditions, admirably observed in the Middle-Ages, produced the courtly love of that time. The honoured mistress of the chateau remained within its walls while the knight set out for the Crusades and thought about his lady. In those days a man scarcely ever tried to arouse love in the object of his passion. He resigned himself to loving in silence, or at least without hope. Such frustrated passions are considered by some to be naive and unreal, but to certain sensitive souls this kind of remote admiration is extremely pleasurable, because, being quite subjective, it is better protected against deception and disillusion.”

André Maurois

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

Love , Women , Pleasure , Age

“In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library.”

André Maurois

The Art of Writing

Life , World , Art , Imagination

“It's better to arouse pity than envy.”

André Maurois

A Time for Silence

Envy

“A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.”

André Maurois

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

Past

“Paul Valéry has no hesitation in saying that the greatest evils today are elections and diplomas.”

André Maurois

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

Evil

“There is much to be said concerning retirement. Some men cannot survive it because they have not prepared themselves for it. For the man who has retained his curiosity, retirement in old age can be the most enjoyable period of his life; but he must be aware of the emptiness of public renown and desire the peace of obscurity; he must still have the wish to learn and understand; in his village, his garden, or his house, he must have some restricted personal occupation. The wise man, after having given all his time to his public activities, now devotes himself entirely to his personal affairs and development; and this will be easier for him if he has been able to interest himself in poetry and the beauties of nature, even during his busiest years. For myself, I cannot imagine a pleasanter old age than one spent in the not too remote country where I could reread and annotate my favorite books. "The mind," says Montaigne, "must thrive upon old age as the mistletoe upon a dead oak."”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Life , Men , Books , Age

“A gentleman is never in a hurry.”

André Maurois

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

“The dead are friends whom death is powerless to take from us. Great writers are immortal companions who can embellish our old age as they enchanted our young days. Music, too, is an extraordinarily faithful friend. To those of us who have lost our faith in human nature, it offers refuge in other pleasant worlds.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Death , Age , World , Faith

“The art of growing old is the art of being regarded by the oncoming generations as a support and not as a stumbling-block, as a confidant and not as a rival.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Art , Confidence , Support

“Incoherence is not the monopoly of madness: all the main ideas of a sane man are irrational erections build up, for better or worse, to express his deepest feelings.”

André Maurois

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

Feeling , Idea , Madness

“It is better to teach a few things perfectly than many things indifferently, and an overloaded curriculum is useless. The object of instruction is not to produce technicians, but good active minds.”

André Maurois

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

Indifference

“There is not one who speaks of us in our presence as he does in our absence," wrote Pascal. "All affection is based on this mutual deception, and few friendships would survive if we knew what our friends were saying of us behind our backs.”

André Maurois

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

Friendship

“A father is rarely a good teacher; either he thinks he knows things and finds his knowledge to be very slight, or he knows but explains badly, or he is too severe and impatient because teaching bores him, or he is dangerously indulgent because he loves his children too much. It is from professional teachers who have made a success of the art that we must learn its rules. There can be no teaching without discipline. A pupil must first learn to work. Training of the will must precede that of the mind, and this is why home teaching is never very successful. Excuses are too easily accepted: the child has a headache; he has slept badly; there is a party somewhere. A school makes no compromise and that is its virtue. I am inclined to prefer the boarding-school system. It has some serious drawbacks; it sometimes produces immorality and it is always rather severe, but it makes men. The system forces boys to find their own places in a group; in a family they find these places ready-made and it is too easy for them. If absolutely necessary, and if the parents are judicious, day schools are satisfactory up to the age of fifteen or sixteen. For boys between the ages of seventeen and twenty, freedom in a large city is fatal.”

André Maurois

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

Love , Men , Children , Age

“Auguste Comte defines the feminine sex as the affective or emotional sex, and the male sex as the effective or active sex. This must be understood as meaning that with women there is a much close connection between mind and body. Woman's thought are less abstract than man's.”

André Maurois

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

Women , Sex