Quotes from Andre Maurois

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity — romantic love and gunpowder.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

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

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

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

People are what you make them. A scornful look turns into a complete fool a man of average intelligence. A contemptuous indifference turns into an enemy a woman who, well treated, might have been an angel.

The need to express oneself in writing springs from a mal-adjustment to life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action. Those to whom action comes as easily as breathing rarely feel the need to break loose from the real, to rise above, and describe it... I do not mean that it is enough to be maladjusted to become a great writer, but writing is, for some, a method of resolving a conflict, provided they have the necessary talent.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity -- romantic love and gunpowder.

Smile, for everyone lacks self-confidence and more than any other one thing a smile reassures them.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game is finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul.

Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

We are almost always the craftsman of our own unhappiness.

And why wander in these labyrinths? Once more, for aesthetic reasons; because this present infinity, these "vertiginous symmetries," have their tragic beauty. The form is more important than the content.

Lo que mas separa a las personas es, sin duda, que unos vivan en el pasado y otros en el presente.

Toujours l'inattendu arrive

Even our strongest emotions die, don't you think? And we can look back to the woman we were three years ago with the same curiosity and detachment as if it were someone else.

Amamos a aquellas personas que destilan una extraña esencia, que es la que nos falta para tener un compuesto químico equilibrado.

The really important thing I've realized in the last year is that if we truly love we mustn't attach too much importance to the things that the people we love do. We need them; they alone mean we can live in a particular 'atmosphere' (your friend Helene calls it a 'climate' and that's exactly right) that we can't get by without. So long as we can keep them, hold on to them good God, what does the rest matter?

One might have said that reason made him flee from reason.

The life of a couple is lived on the mental level of the more mediocre of the two beings who compose it.

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

La lectura de un buen libro es un diálogo incesante, en que el libro habla y el alma escucha.