Andre Maurois Quotes - Page 3

Information is not culture. In the mind of a truly educated person, facts are organized, and they make up a living world in the image of the world of reality.

No one can be profoundly original who does not avoid eccentricity.

Style is the outcome of constraint.

The longer the road to love, the keener is the pleasure...

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us.

Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to form.

Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.

If you create a character, you create a destiny.

Our minds have unbelievable power over our bodies.

It is not events and the things one sees and enjoys that produce happiness, but a state of mind which can endow events with its own quality, and we must hope for the duration of this state rather than the recurrence of pleasurable events.

Advice is always a confession.

Novelty, the most potent of all attractions, is also the most perishable.

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.

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.

Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions.

One has very little influence upon one's children. Their characters are what they are and one can do nothing to change them.

A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

To desire to be perpetually in the society of a pretty woman until the end of one's days, is as if, because one likes good wine, one wished always to have one's mouth full of it.

Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.

We don't love a woman for what she says, we like what she says because we love her.

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.

Learning is nothing without cultivated manners, but when the two are combined in a woman, you have one of the most exquisite products of civilization.

An old man, having retired from active life, regains the gaity and irresponsibility of childhood. He is ready to play, he cannot run with his son, but he can totter with his grandson. Our first and last steps have the same rhythm.

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.