André Maurois Quotes

Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true; everything that is not puts us in a rage.

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

Pascal said that if geometry stirred us emotionally as much as politics we would not be able to expound it so well.

To reason with poorly chosen words is like using a pair of scales with inaccurate weights.

The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.

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 friendship of two young people, says Goethe somewhere, is delightful when the girl likes to learn and the boy to teach.

It is often maintained that friendship between men and women can never approach the high level of friendship between men. How, it is objected, could sensuality not be present in such relationships? if it were not present, would not the least coquettish of women feel herself humiliated? It is contrary to every natural impulse for a man to associate with a woman as freely as is usual in friendship without occasionally being conscious of physical desire, and if he is conscious of it, the whole machinery of the passions is set in motion.

Dramatists have always made fun of the friendship between a husband and his wife's lover. But is it so comic? These two men undoubtedly have more to say to one another than the lover and his mistress. They get on perfectly well, and it is often the husband's presence that makes endurable the intolerable boredom of certain affairs of this sort. Cases have been known where a break occurred almost immediately following the husband's withdrawal from the scene.

A successful marriage puts an end to feminine friendships; but if marriage is a failure, the young woman must have others to confide in.

Friendship is the positive and unalterable choice of a person whom we have singled out for qualities that we most admire.

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.

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.

Does absolute reliance carry with it a complete exchange of confidences? I believe that true friendship cannot exist otherwise.

True friendship implies full confidence, which may only be completely given or completely withdrawn. If friendship has continually to be analyzed, nursed, and cured, it will cause more anguish than love itself, without having love's strength and its remedies. And if this confidence is ill-placed? Well - I would rather be betrayed by a false friend than deceive a true one.