André Maurois Quotes

We are always repeating ancestral signs which are quite useless now. When a great actress wants to express hate she draws back her charming lips and shows her canine teeth, an unconscious sign of cannibalism. We shake hands with a friend to prevent him using it to strike us, and we take off our hats because our ancestors used to humbly offer their heads, to the bigwigs of those days, to be cut off.

What shall we know of our death? Either the soul is immortal and we shall not die, or it perishes with the flesh and we shall not know that we are dead. Live, then, as if you were eternal, and do not believe that your life has changed merely because it seems proved that the Earth is empty. You do not live in the Earth, you live in yourself.

Style is the outcome of constraint.

Marriage is not at all what romantic lovers imagine it to be; it is an institution founded upon an instinct; to be successful, it requires not only physical attraction, but will-power, patience, and the always difficult acceptance of "the other"; finally, if these conditions are fulfilled, a beautiful and lasting affection can be established - a unique and, to those who have never known it, incomprehensible mingling of love, friendship, sensuality, and respect, without which there is no true marriage.

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

We English, Lord Tyrrell, Ambassador to France, said to me about 1930, we English, after the war, made two mistakes: we believed the French, because they had been victorious, had become Germans, and we believed the Germans, through some mysterious transmutation, had become Englishmen.

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.

As far as possible the duty of a leader is to foresee dissatisfaction and to remedy injustice before complaints are made. To accomplish this he must maintain close contact with the men he controls. Let him go into the trenches if he is a general; let him arrive at the factory with his workmen now and then if he is the manager. He must have some imagination; an understanding of other men's lives is necessary to him, so that he may be able to protect those under him from unnecessary suffering. The secret of gaining their affection is to feel affection for them and to be able to do their jobs as well as they do them themselves. Men endure taking orders, and even like it, if the orders are given intelligently.

Great things are not accomplished with physical strength and agility, says Cicero, but through consultation, authority, and the mature wisdom which old age, far from lacking, is endowed with abundantly.

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 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.

"I should not care to be married for my money," said Lucie. "Oh, strange creature!" said the doctor, "you would like to be loved for your face alone, that is to say, for the position in space of the albuminoids and fatty molecules placed there by the working of some Mendelian heredity, but you would dislike to be loved for your fortune, to which you have contributed by your labor and your domestic virtues.

The old writer, like the old actor, is a master of his craft. Youthfulness of style is no more than a matter of technique.

To work is to transform or move things or creatures in ways that will render them more useful or more beautiful; it is also to study the laws governing these transformations, formulate them or apply them.

Old age diminishes our strength; it takes away our pleasures one after the other; it withers the soul as well as the body; it renders adventure and friendship difficult; and finally it is shadowed by thoughts of death.