169 Quotes by Andre Maurois

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

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.

A friend loves you for your intelligence, a mistress for your charm, but your family’s love is unreasoning; you were born into it and are of its flesh and blood. Nevertheless it can irritate you more than any group of people in the world.

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.

It is restful to leave one’s home; not because traveling does not entail varied and difficult daily actions, but because it removes our responsibilities.

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.

A great man’s manias must be respected, because the time required to combat them is too precious to waste.

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

Woman’s great strength lies in being late or absent. Presence immediately reveals the weak points of our beloved; when she is absent she become one of the sylph-like figures of our adolescence whom we endowed with perfection.