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André Maurois Quotes
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André Maurois was a French author.



✵ 26. July 1885 – 9. October 1967
André Maurois photo
André Maurois: 202 quotes4 likes

André Maurois Quotes

“Our poor bodies have strength and resources that we learn to know only when we are in the gravest situations.”

André Maurois

A Time for Silence

“A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.”

André Maurois

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

André Maurois

A Time for Silence

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“…Sometimes with men, their pride can override their hearts…”

André Maurois

A Time for Silence

“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

“Only passions can raise a man above the level of the animal.”

André Maurois

The Art of Writing

“A friend loves you for your intelligence, a mistress for your charm, but your family's love is unreasoning; you were born into it and are of its flesh and blood. Nevertheless it can irritate you more than any group of people in the world.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Family Life

“So, human beings complain that the world is ill-made, do they? But ill-made for whom? For Man, who, in the immense design of the Universe is no more than an unimportant mould! The probability is that everything in this world which we think is botched or erroneous has its reasons at a totally different level of existence. The mould endures, no doubt, a small amount of suffering, but somewhere there are giants who, huge in stature as in mind, live in a state of semi-divinity. This is Voltaire's answer to the problem of evil. It is not very satisfactory because the mould need never have been created, and, in the eyes of God, it may well be that mere size is of no importance.”

André Maurois

The Art of Writing

“Women apparently achieve happiness more easily with energetic and virile men, men achieve it more easily with women who are affectionate and willing to be led. Very young women declare that they want to marry men whom they can dominate, but I have never discovered a woman who was truly happy with a man she did not admire for his strength and courage, nor a normal man who was perfectly happy with an Amazon. The fact is that the element of chance in these matters rarely allows a man or a woman to choose a life companion by an act of pure volition, and it is better so; instinct, despite its mistakes, is surer here than intelligence. The question Do I have to fall in love? should not be asked; one must feel the answer to it within oneself. The birth of love, like all other births, is the work of nature.”

André Maurois

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

“Human nature is such that the spectacle of another's weakness awakens even in the best of us a feeling of power which contains, along with the sincerest pity, an almost imperceptible mingling of pleasure.”

André Maurois

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

“The leveling influence of mediocrity and the denial of the supreme importance of the mind's development account for many revolts against family life. There are many occasions when great men are convinced that, in order to fulfill their destinies, they must escape from the warmth and indulgence of their own families.”

André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Family Life

“The officer of today has seen active service, it's true but as a matter of fact it is quite sufficient in war to have good health and no more imagination than a fish. It is in peace-time that one ought to judge a soldier.”

André Maurois

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

“The art of thinking is also the art of believing, because no human being at the present stage of civilization could safely call all his individual and social beliefs into question again or submit them to his conscience. To change all one's opinions is a mental diversion which requires leisure for its indulgence. In order to live a life of action, man must accept most of the moral, social, and religious laws which have been recognized as necessary by his predecessors.”

André Maurois

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

“What men call friendship is only social intercourse, an exchange of favours and good offices; it comes down to a commercial dealing in which self-esteem always expects to profit.”

André Maurois

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

“At eighty, a man has experienced everything: love, and its ending; ambition, and its emptiness; several foolish beliefs, and their rectification. Fear of death is not very great; affections and interest concern people who have died and events of the past. In a cinema theatre when the show is continuous the spectator has the right to retain his seat as long as he wishes to do so, but actually, when the scenes he has already witnessed reappear on the screen, he leaves the theatre. Life is a continuous show. The same events take place every thirty years, and they become boring. One after another the spectators take their departure.”

André Maurois

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

“It is easy to be admired when one remains inaccessible.”

André Maurois

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

“You see us poor Englishmen searching hard for the solution of a problem when there isn't one. You may think that the Irish want certain definite reforms, and that they will be happy and contented the day they get them; but not at all. What amuses them is discussion itself, plotting in theory. They play with the idea of Home Rule; if we gave it them, the game would be finished and they would invent another, probably a more dangerous one.”

André Maurois

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