André Maurois cytaty

strona 5

„Gdzie jest człowiek, który myśli to, co myśli?”

„Kobiety niczego by nie żądały, gdyby kochano je tak, jak pragną.”

„I kokietka może być zdolna do prawdziwej namiętności. Tylko, że nie w stosunku do tego samego mężczyzny, w tym rzecz.”

„Niesłusznie się mówi, że miłość jest ślepa – prawdą jest, że ma braki lub słabości, które widzi doskonale, miłość jest obojętna, jeśli sądzi, że znajduje w danej istocie to, co jest dla miłości najważniejsze, a co nieraz nie daje się określić.”

„Zwierzenia są jak kobiety: te, których mocno pragniemy uciekają od nas; te, których się obawiamy, narzucają się nam.”

„Podejrzenia założone w umyśle wybuchają jak miny łańcuchowe i niszczą miłość eksplozjami następującymi jedna po drugiej.”

„Nie piękno scenerii tworzy miłość, lecz miłość upiększa pejzaże i miasta.”

„Miłość rozbija okowy samotności.”

„Nawet odwzajemniona miłość jest straszliwa.”

„Miłość pomyślna, czyli taka, gdzie wszystko idzie możliwie, to rzecz trudna, ale miłość gdzie się nie wiedzie – to piekło.”

„Mężczyźni wyginęli. Od biedy można jeszcze znaleźć męża, ale mężczyzna mający czas dla kobiety i pragnący z nią rozmawiać – przestał istnieć.”

„Mężczyźni nie patrzą na suknie. Nie kocha się kobiety dla tego, co ma na sobie.”

„Kobiety lubią, by wiedziały, że są kochane.”

„Mężczyzna ambitny chce błyszczeć poprzez swe dzieła lub co najmniej w związku ze swymi dziełami. Kobieta szuka blasku, który mogłaby odbijać.”

„Nie kocha się kobiety za to, co ona mówi, lecz lubi się to, co ona mówi, ponieważ się ją kocha.”

„Handel jest złym doradcą dyplomatycznym.”

„Prześladowanie podsyca wiarę; tolerancja usypia ją.”

„Pretekst nigdy nie musi być prawdopodobny. Inaczej byłby racją.”

„Artysta podoba się publiczności zarówno dzięki swym dziełom, jak dzięki buntowi przeciw konwenansom.”

„Szczęśliwe małżeństwo – to długa rozmowa, która wciąż wydaje się za krótka.”

„Trup zgadza się być tym, czym jest. Ale tylko trup.”

„Rocznice były zawsze terenem bardzo podatnym do rozpalania namiętności.”

„Należy zawsze ukrywać to, co się czuje, by zachować to, co się kocha.”

„Zapewne życie jest krótkie, ale w stosunku do czego?”

„Z gustami literackimi jest po trosze jak z miłością: zdumiewa nas, co też to inni wybierają.”

„Człowieka zawsze kusi, by rozczulać się nad sobą i odmalowywać siebie takim, jakim by się chciało być.”

„Szczęśliwe małżeństwo to gmach, który odbudowywać trzeba co dzień.”

„W literaturze, podobnie jak w miłości, zdumiewa nas, co wybierają inni.”

„Ludzkość była zawsze podzielona, mniej więcej równo, na optymistów i pesymistów.”

„Wielka miłość nie wystarcza, żeby przywiązać istotę, którą się kocha, jeśli się nie potrafi jednocześnie wypełnić całego życia tamtej bez ustanku odnawianym bogactwem.”

„Łatwiej jest głosić pokój niż go zachować.”

„Wszystko, co zgadza się z naszymi życzeniami, jest prawdą. Wszystko inne doprowadza nas do wściekłości.”

„Miłość łatwiej znosi nieobecność lub śmierć niż zwątpienie lub zdradę.”

„Każde wielkie przeobrażenie społeczne ma swych teoretyków, którzy wymyślają przyczyny stałe dla wyjaśnienia skutków przejściowych.”

„Kiedy się kocha kobietę wszystko, co łączy się z jej obrazem, miłość nasza stroi w zalety i cnoty urojone.”

„Małżeństwo bez konfliktów jest prawie tak samo nie do pomyślenia jak społeczeństwo bez kryzysów.”

„Władza absolutna wywołuje u człowieka rozpętanie najgorszych instynktów.”

„W miłości kto nie pożera, sam jest pożerany, a jednak poddać się, szukać własnego szczęścia w szczęściu kogoś drugiego – to może być wyzwoleniem.”

„Jest coś jeszcze obrzydliwszego niż przekupny sędzia – sędzia żartowniś.”

„W niczym nie grzęźniesz łatwiej niż w powodzeniu.”

„Starzeć się to o tyle groźniejsze! Godzić się ze swoim losem, ze swym stanowiskiem, z tą psią budą wzniesioną nad jedynym przecie życiem… Kiedy jest się młodym, nie wie się, czym jest śmierć…”

„Młodość jest religią, z której prędzej czy później trzeba się w końcu nawrócić.”

„Droga Królewska wiodła już tylko ku szczątkom, jakie po sobie pozostawiają, niczym szkielety, wędrówki ludów i pochody wojsk.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Style is the outcome of constraint.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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."”