Quotes by
Henry de Montherlant |
1895-1972 , French writer
French essayist, novelist, and dramatist, became member of the Académie française in 1960.His first success was the 1934 novel Les Célibataires. His best seller was the tetralogy Les Jeunes Filles, (1936–1939). In these years Montherlant, a rich aristocrat, traveled extensively, mainly to Spain (he had a passion for bullfighting), Italy, and Algeria, giving vent to his passion of street boys...
He wrote plays such as Pasiphaé (1936), Malatesta (1946), Port-Royal (1954), Le Cardinal d'Espagne (1960).
Montherlant treated pederastic themes in his work, such as in the novel Les Garçons published in 1969 but written four or five decades earlier.
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Quotations
| • | Politics is the art of using people. 11 |
| • | The smell is the intelligence of flowers. 6 |
| • | Happiness writes in white ink on a white page. 5 |
| • | Too quick revenge is no longer revenge; it is a response. 5 |
| • | The meaning of the kiss: you are food for me. 5 |
| • | What lasts is indifference. Nothing lasts on a tree more than a dead branch. 4 |
| • | It is by the audacity of their grammatical mistakes that we recognize the great writers. 4 |
| • | Confidence is one of the divine possibilities of man. 4 |
| • | Life is not taking, it is desire. 4 |
| • | The critic insults the author: this is called criticism. The author insults the critic: this is called insult. 4 |
| • | Everything is a matter of point of view, and misfortune is often only a sign of a false interpretation of life. |
| • | God only fills us as long as we are empty. |
| • | Everyone did not become completely themselves until the day their parents died. |
| • | There is no power. There is the abuse of power, nothing else. |
| • | Misfortune can only be consoled with the misfortune of others. |
| • | All women stubbornly revolve around what should burn them. |
| • | Do not lie: it is a defense that is only given to children. |
| • | After making love, the first to speak says something stupid. |
| • | By announcing good news, we make ourselves friendly. By announcing bad ones, we make ourselves important: choose. |
| • | Long live who abandons me! He returns me to myself. |
| • | Dying for a cause doesn’t make that cause just. |
| • | Hesitation is the hallmark of intelligence. |
| • | Freedom still exists. You just have to pay the price. |
| • | A father’s worst anger against his son is more tender than a son's tender love for his father. |
| • | Some take for friendship what is charity |
| • | Woman’s ideal: to be served in the little things, and to serve in the big ones. |
| • | If you have influence, at least pretend to ignore it. |
| • | There is only one immortality that would be worth wishing for: it is that of life. |
| • | Religion is the venereal disease of mankind. Politics is the cancer. |
| • | It’s not the reality that’s vulgar, it’s the ideal. |
| • | Life becomes a delicious thing, as soon as you decide not to take it seriously anymore. |
| • | Dreams are life without memory |
| • | We lie better in writing. |
| • | We recognize the free man by being attacked simultaneously or successively by the opposing parties. |
| • | There is no government that is not guilty. By what it covers. |
| • | Human stupidity is having a lot of ideas, but stupid ideas. |
| • | We have two kinds of happiness: the ones we get without harming anyone, and the ones we get by stabbing someone. |
| • | Smart men can't be good husbands for the very reason that they don't get married. |
| • | You should never say everything, even to a stone. |
| • | Almost all human life is corrupted by the need to justify existence. |
| • | Since ideals have such an irresistible inclination to disappoint us, it is wisdom to have more than one. |
| • | Man is a monster of inconsistency. |
| • | A man without childishness is a monster. |
| • | The mystery of man is that woman can love him. |
| • | Melancholy is the little luxury of poor souls. |
| • | Dictators are born in the houses where one does not dare to give an order to the maid. |
| • | This is a sure sign of barbarism: in any society, it is always the elements of inferior intelligence who are hungry to be up to date. Incapable of discerning by taste, culture and critical thinking, they automatically judge, according to this principle, that truth is novelty. |
| • | The war has remained for me the most tender human experience that I have lived. |
| • | Let us choose our enemies well. So let us choose our friends well, since these will become those. |
| • | We love, in animals, that we can kill them legally. In war, too, we like to be able to kill legally. Of course, men never admit that. |
| • | Revolutions waste a lot of time. |
| • | Pleasure is as candid as death. Pleasure and the great tragic taste the same, and it is good. |
| • | There is nothing more moving in the world than talking seriously to a child. |
| • | A woman of thirty-five always looks older than a man of thirty-five. Why ? Because it really is. |
| • | Politics is the art of harnessing the passions of others for your own benefit. |
| • | The real strength of style is in the feeling. |
| • | We are old when we need sympathy. It is as sure a sign as the arteries. |
| • | There should be a special way of reading maxims: one page a day, maybe. |
| • | Youth: time of failures. |
| • | Young people, not having the strength, simulate cynicism, which seems to them a proof of strength. Mature men, having strength, simulate altruism, to conceal their strength. |
| • | Memory is the intelligence of fools. |
| • | There is the real and there is the unreal. Beyond the real and beyond the unreal, there is the deep. |
| • | Publishing a book is talking at the table in front of the servants. |
| • | Men can only agree on prejudices. |
| • | There is no merit in being convinced of something. There is no demerit in not being convinced of anything. |
| • | The hermit believes he has found God because he has found loneliness. |
| • | The greatest service that we can render to a being: to teach him very early to know how to use life. |
| • | All that is natural is unfair. |
| • | A golden rule: do little. |
| • | Our emotions are in our words like stuffed birds. |
| • | This great unrecognized spring of so many human behaviors, idleness. |
| • | If you are not ready to kill what you claim to hate, do not say you hate: you are prostituting that word. |
| • | Vanity is the dominant passion of man. |
| • | Everything that is not passion has a background of boredom. |
