André Maurois Quotes

If you want to be thought anything of amongst Englishmen, you must make yourself see their point of view. They don't care for melancholy people, and have a contempt for sentiment. This applies to love as well as to patriotism and religion.

I like the War. It is only War that gives us a normal existence. What do you do in peace-time? You stay at home; you don't know what to do with your time; you argue with your parents, and your wife - if you have one. Everyone thinks you are an insufferable egotist - and so you are. The War comes; you only go home every five or six months. You are a hero, and, what women appreciate much more, you are a change. You know stories that have never been published. You've seen strange men and terrible things. Your father, instead of telling his friends that you are embittering the end of his life, introduces you to them as an oracle. These old men consult you on foreign politics. I you are married, your wife is prettier than ever; if you are not, all the girls lay siege to you.

British conversation is like a game of cricket or a boxing match; personal allusions are forbidden like hitting below the belt, and anyone who loses his temper is disqualified.

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.

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.

It is unprecedented for the men who made a revolution to remain in power after it is over. Yet one still finds revolutionaries: that proves how badly history is taught.

We don't go to school to learn, but to be soaked in the prejudices of our class, without which we should be useless and unhappy.

The true sporting spirit has always something religious about it.

To interest a Frenchman in a boxing match you must tell him that his national honor is at stake. To interest an Englishman in a war you need only suggest that it is a kind of a boxing match. Tell us that the Hun is a barbarian, we agree politely, but tell us that he is a bad sportsman and you rouse the British Empire.

The people themselves, men and women, are sometimes in France, works of art... [M]any Frenchmen, in the happy days of peace, had turned life into a fine art. What could be more delightful than to dine with a few well-chosen friends, in a small Paris restaurant? The owner, who was called the Patron, was, of course, at the same time, the chef. He wasn't so much interested in your money as in your appreciation of his great talents. He wasn't a tradesman, but an artist and a friend. And the guests were often worthy of the setting. Paris conversation at its best was witty, brilliant, sometimes deep, never ponderous, sparkling with anecdotes, portraits and sketches of the great.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at the courts of the last Kings of France, idle men and women of infinite subtlety took pleasure in analysing very minutely each other's feelings and thoughts. The result was this wonderful literature that goes from La Bruyère and Pascal to Stendhal and Marcel Proust. France became a country of very refined taste. The part played by her in modern Europe was in a way similar to that played by Greece in the ancient world; she took pleasure in a delicious simplicity. Other literatures may have had more strength, more romantic violence; none had that mysterious perfection.

No country in the world has more reverence than France for a good literary education. Every middleclass Frenchman knows at least some of his classics by heart; he has been brought up on La Fontaine, and Corneille, and Molière. The Comédie-Française, which is the national theatre, and the French Academy, are public institutions, and a surprisingly great part of the nation takes an interest in their ceremonies. Very often in the course of the last fifty years, France was governed by professors. Whether it was a sound idea or not is another story, but it is a fact, and it shows the great importance attached by Frenchmen to classical eloquence, to the proper use of words, to simple and beautiful language.

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.

A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.