Top 100 André Maurois Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Business is a combination of war and sport.”

— André Maurois

2. “If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny.”

— André Maurois

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

— André Maurois

4. “Sincerity is glass, discretion is diamond.”

— André Maurois

5. “The effectiveness of work increases according to geometric progression if there are no interruptions.”

— André Maurois

6. “Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life’s nothingness.”

— André Maurois

7. “A gentleman is never in a hurry.”

— André Maurois

8. “Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more humane world.”

— André Maurois

9. “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.”

— André Maurois

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

— André Maurois

11. “We can talk frankly about our defects only to those who recognise our qualities.”

— André Maurois

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

— André Maurois

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

— André Maurois

14. “We appreciate frankness from those who like us. Frankness from others is called insolence.”

— André Maurois

15. “If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.”

— André Maurois

16. “In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.”

— André Maurois

17. “Above all things, never be afraid. The enemy who forces you to retreat is himself afraid of you at that very moment.”

— André Maurois

18. “A true woman loves a strong man because she knows his weaknesses. She protects as much as she is protected.”

— André Maurois

19. “A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.”

— André Maurois

20. “We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity – romantic love and gunpowder.”

— André Maurois

21. “The first recipe for happiness is: avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.”

— André Maurois

22. “The art of growing old is the art of being regarded by the oncoming generations as a support and not as a stumbling-block.”

— André Maurois

23. “Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game 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.”

— André Maurois

24. “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.”

— André Maurois

25. “For intelligent people, action often means escape from thought, but it is a reasonable and a wise escape.”

— André Maurois

26. “Advice is always a confession.”

— André Maurois

27. “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.”

— André Maurois

28. “There are certain persons for whom pure Truth is a poison.”

— André Maurois

29. “He who wants to do everything will never do anything.”

— André Maurois

30. “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.”

— André Maurois

31. “Two human beings anchored to one another are like two ships shaken by waves; their carcases collide with one another and creak.”

— André Maurois

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

— André Maurois

33. “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.”

— André Maurois

34. “Style is the outcome of constraint.”

— André Maurois

35. “An unsatisfied woman requires luxury, but a woman who is in love with a man will lie on a board.”

— André Maurois

36. “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.”

— André Maurois

37. “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.”

— André Maurois

38. “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.”

— André Maurois

39. “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.”

— André Maurois

40. “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.”

— André Maurois

41. “Genius consists of equal parts of natural aptitude and hard work.”

— André Maurois

42. “The minds of different generations are as impenetrable one by the other as are the monads of Leibniz.”

— André Maurois

43. “He who has found a good wife has found great happiness, but a quarrelsome woman is like a roof that lets in the rain.”

— André Maurois

44. “The greedy search for money or success will almost always lead men into unhappiness. Why? Because that kind of life makes them depend upon things outside themselves.”

— André Maurois

45. “Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.”

— André Maurois

46. “The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.”

— André Maurois

47. “To be witty is not enough. One must possess sufficient wit to avoid having too much of it.”

— André Maurois

48. “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.”

— André Maurois

49. “The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one’s opinion but rather to know it.”

— André Maurois

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

— André Maurois