André Maurois - The Silence of Colonel Bramble (1918)

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

André Maurois
If you have observed nature, you would have proved that the question of the numbers of mates is certainly not a question of arithmetic. With gnats, ten females are born to one male. Now gnats are not polygamous. Nine out of those females dies spinsters. It is only the old maids who bite us, from which one sees that celibacy engenders ferocity among insects as well as among women.

André Maurois
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.

André Maurois
Telephones are like women. No one really knows anything about them. One fine day, something goes wrong; you try to find out why, no good, you swear, you shake them up a bit and all is well.

André Maurois
There are very few really brilliant men who have not had at least one madman among their ancestors.

André Maurois
Nietzsche was a genius because he delighted in persecution. Karl Marx was a dangerous maniac. It is only when the feelings of discontent which he tries to explain coincide with those of a whole class, or a whole nation, that the impassioned theorist becomes a prophet, or a hero; while, if he confines himself to explaining that he would rather have been born an Emperor, they shut him up.

André Maurois
A married man seeks to please his wife and not God.

André Maurois
Incoherence is not the monopoly of madness: all the main ideas of a sane man are irrational erections build up, for better or worse, to express his deepest feelings.

André Maurois
The whole reason of this War is because the Germans have no sense of humor.

André Maurois
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
It is a fairly consistent law of humanity that men spend about half their lives at war. A Frenchman, called Lapouge, calculated that from the year 1100 to the year 1500, England had been 207 years at war and 212 years from 1500 to 1900. In France the corresponding figures would be 192 and 181 years. According to that same man Lapouge, nineteen million men are killed in war every century. Their blood would fill three million barrels of 180 liters each, and would feed a fountain of blood running 700 liters an hour from the beginning of history.

André Maurois
The officer of today has seen active service, it's true but as a matter of fact it is quite sufficient in war to have good health and no more imagination than a fish. It is in peace-time that one ought to judge a soldier.

André Maurois
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
Medicine is a very old joke, but it still goes on.

André Maurois
All primitive people thought that a lunatic was possessed by a spirit. When his incoherent words more or less accord with the moral prejudices of the time, the spirit is a good one, and the man i s a saint. In the opposite case, the spirit is evil and the man must be suppressed. It is just according to the time and place and the doctors, whether a prophetess would be worshipped as a priestess or ducked as a witch. Innumerable violent lunatics have escaped the cells, thanks to the War, and their very violence has made heroes of them. And in every Parliament there are at least five or six undisputed idiots who got elected for their madness through the admiration of their constituents.

André Maurois
The true sporting spirit has always something religious about it.

André Maurois
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.

André Maurois
It is unprecedented for the men who made a revolution to remain in power after it is over. Yet one still finds revolutionaries: that proves how badly history is taught.

André Maurois
We are always repeating ancestral signs which are quite useless now. When a great actress wants to express hate she draws back her charming lips and shows her canine teeth, an unconscious sign of cannibalism. We shake hands with a friend to prevent him using it to strike us, and we take off our hats because our ancestors used to humbly offer their heads, to the bigwigs of those days, to be cut off.

André Maurois
You see us poor Englishmen searching hard for the solution of a problem when there isn't one. You may think that the Irish want certain definite reforms, and that they will be happy and contented the day they get them; but not at all. What amuses them is discussion itself, plotting in theory. They play with the idea of Home Rule; if we gave it them, the game would be finished and they would invent another, probably a more dangerous one.

André Maurois
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.

André Maurois
If you want to be thought anything of amongst Englishmen, you must make yourself see their point of view. They don't care for melancholy people, and have a contempt for sentiment. This applies to love as well as to patriotism and religion.

André Maurois
To interest a Frenchman in a boxing match you must tell him that his national honor is at stake. To interest an Englishman in a war you need only suggest that it is a kind of a boxing match. Tell us that the Hun is a barbarian, we agree politely, but tell us that he is a bad sportsman and you rouse the British Empire.

André Maurois
"I should not care to be married for my money," said Lucie. "Oh, strange creature!" said the doctor, "you would like to be loved for your face alone, that is to say, for the position in space of the albuminoids and fatty molecules placed there by the working of some Mendelian heredity, but you would dislike to be loved for your fortune, to which you have contributed by your labor and your domestic virtues.

André Maurois
The love of humanity is a pathological state of a sexual origin which often appears at the age of puberty in nervous and clever people. The excess of phosphorus in the system must get out somewhere. 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.

André Maurois