114 quotes
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.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
It only requires a glance at the advertisements in American magazines to understand how strong and how continuous is woman's preoccupation with her conquest of man.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
Human beings are lazy and it very often happens that one wearies of a new-born emotion for no valid reason unless there is some restraint to stimulate and stabilize it.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
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.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
Why, when I have won her, do I continue to woo her? Because, though she belongs to me, she is not and never will be mine.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
Most of us have to conquer and ceaselessly reconquer the person whom we desire. It is therefore necessary to arouse love in that person.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
England will pay ten thousand a year to a lawyer or a banker, but when she has splendid fellows like me who conquer empires and keep them for her, she only gives them just enough to keep their polo ponies.
Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble) (1918)
Writing should never be allowed to become a substitute for living. Style cannot breath in a void. It should not be forgotten that Dickens was at one time a reporter, Balzac a lawyer's clerk and Tchekov a county doctor. Art is different from life but cannot exist without it.
The Art of Writing (1957)
The art of growing old is the art of being regarded by the oncoming generations as a support and not as a stumbling-block, as a confidant and not as a rival.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
There is no happiness without forgetfulness. I have never known a real man of action to be unhappy during action. How could he be? Like a child at play, he stops thinking of himself.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
Human nature is such that the spectacle of another's weakness awakens even in the best of us a feeling of power which contains, along with the sincerest pity, an almost imperceptible mingling of pleasure.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
I have always maintained...that no one judges the mistakes of love — so long as they are accompanied by sincere repentance — that no one judges them with more understanding than a woman at once irreproachable and sensitive.
A Time for Silence (1942)
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.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
Almost all men improve on acquaintance.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
"A man's life is happy," says Pascal, "if he begins by being in love and ends by being ambitious." It will be still happier if, after all his ambitions have been satisfied, it ends in tranquility.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
The man who truly loves his work returns to it after the briefest rest with a curious kind of voluptuousness. When he is completely absorbed in his job, the end of work seems like the end of life.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
"Nothing," wrote General de Gaulle, "strengthens authority so much as silence." Speech dilutes thought; it allows one's courage to leak away — in short, it dissipates the concentration that is required.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
"Great things are not accomplished with physical strength and agility," says Cicero, "but through consultation, authority, and the mature wisdom which old age, far from lacking, is endowed with abundantly."
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939)
The cinema...may have a specific beauty of its own, but it does not permit that constant re-reading, that meditative brooding, those turning-back to passages heavily charged with meaning, which form the special pleasure of the novel-reader.
The Art of Writing (1957)
As for hatred of a tyrant, that is a more human sentiment which has full play in time of war, when force and the mob are one. Emperors must be mad fools to decide on declaring wars which substitute an armed nation for their Praetorian Guards. That idiocy accomplished, despotism of course produces revolution until terrorism leads to the inevitable reaction.
Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble) (1918)