Biographers

"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."

"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."

"Women apparently achieve happiness more easily with energetic and virile men, men achieve it more easily with women who are affectionate and willing to be led. Very young women declare that they want to marry men whom they can dominate, but I have never discovered a woman who was truly happy with a man she did not admire for his strength and courage, nor a normal man who was perfectly happy with an Amazon. The fact is that the element of chance in these matters rarely allows a man or a woman to choose a life companion by an act of pure volition, and it is better so; instinct, despite its mistakes, is surer here than intelligence. The question Do I have to fall in love? should not be asked; one must feel the answer to it within oneself. The birth of love, like all other births, is the work of nature."

"Happiness flourishes where there is happiness, and love withers quickly in an atmosphere of constraint and gloom."

"It is a great joy to admire someone without reserve; love which is founded upon admiration of the mind as well as the body of the chosen person undoubtedly affords the keenest delight."

"To feminine eyes a man's prestige, or his fame, envelops him in a luminous haze which obscures his faults. The triumphs of an aviator, an actor, a football player, an orator are often responsible for the beginning of a love affair."

"Revolt against a tyrant is legitimate; it can succeed. Revolt against human nature is doomed to failure."

"Two world wars have destroyed in a few years the material and spiritual capital accumulated by centuries of work. The nineteenth century had hoped to turn man, by virtue of education, into a reasoning being: a half-century of ferocity has proved that a cruel, primitive beast still resides in him."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A gentleman is never in a hurry."

"Dr. Johnson was right," said the colonel to me, "Whoever wants to be a hero ought to drink brandy."

"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."

"The officer of to-day 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."

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

"C'est au moyen âge...que nous devons les deux pires inventions de l’humanité: l’amour romanesque et la poudre à canon."

"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."

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

"'He who has found a good wife has found great happiness'", quoted the padre, "'but a quarrelsome woman is like a roof that lets in the rain.'"

""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."

"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."

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

"A married man is only half a man."

"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."

"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."

"I like the War. It is only War that gives us a normal existence. What do you do in peace-time? You stay at home; you don't know what to do with your time; you argue with your parents, and your wife — if you have one. Everyone thinks you are an insufferable egotist — and so you are. The War comes; you only go home every five or six months. You are a hero, and, what women appreciate much more, you are a change. You know stories that have never been published. You've seen strange men and terrible things. Your father, instead of telling his friends that you are embittering the end of his life, introduces you to them as an oracle. These old men consult you on foreign politics. I you are married, your wife is prettier than ever; if you are not, all the girls lay siege to you."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"L'amour de l'humanité est un état pathologique d’origine sexuelle qui se produit fréquemment à l'époque de la puberté chez les intellectuels timides: le phosphore en excès dans l'organisme doit s'éliminer d’une façon quelconque."

"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."

"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."

"The true sporting spirit has always something religious about it."

"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."

"What shall we know of our death? 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, and do not believe that your life has changed merely because it seems proved that the Earth is empty. You do not live in the Earth, you live in yourself."

"After 1930, political theorists had begun to realize that every democracy—being a government of public opinion—is largely in the hands of those who make public opinion—that is to say, the newspaper-owners. In every country the big business men, the great financiers, were being compelled to purchase the influential newspapers and had little by little succeeded in doing so. They had been very clever in respecting the the external forms of democracy. The people continued to elect their deputies, who continued to to go through the forms of choosing ministers and presidents; but the ministers, presidents, and deputies could hold on to their positions only so long as they did what the Masters of Public Opinion told them to do; and, being well aware of this fact, they were duly submissive."

"Le mélange de l'admiration et de la piété est une des plus sûres recettes de l'affection."

"Antagoras the poet was boiling a conger, and Antigonus, coming behind him as he was stirring his skillet, said, "Do you think, Antagoras, that Homer boiled congers when he wrote the deeds of Agamemnon?" Antagoras replied, "Do you think, O king, that Agamemnon, when he did such exploits, was a peeping in his army to see who boiled congers?""

"[I]t is extremely difficult to say whether he wishes to expound moral philosophy with historical examples, or decorate the narration of important affairs...with philosophical arguments."

"In the writings of such "pagan" philosophers as Plutarch and Porphyry we find a humanitarian ethic of the most exalted kind, which, after undergoing a long repression during medieval churchdom, reappeared, albeit but weakly and fitfully at first, in the literature of the Renaissance, to be traced more definitely in the eighteenth century school of "sensibility.""

"There is another accusation which irritates me on Plutarch's behalf: it is where Bodin says that Plutarch showed good faith in his parallels between Roman and Roman or Greek and Greek but not between Roman and Greek. Witness, he says, Demosthenes and Cicero; Cato and Aristides; Sylla and Lysander; Marcellus and Pelopidas; Pompey and Agesilaus, reckoning as he does that he favoured the Greeks by matching them so unfairly. That is precisely to attack what is most excellent and commendable in Plutarch: for in those parallel lives (which are the most admirable part of his works and to my mind the one he took most pleasure in) the faithfulness and purity of his judgements equals their weight and profundity. He is a philosopher who teaches us what virtue is."

"Plutarch is amazing in every respect but especially where he makes judgements on men's actions."

"My very own Plutarch – so perfect, so outstanding a judge of human actions."

"[Plutarch's works contains] the sum of Greek and Latin history made up of great maxims and greater instances, noble precepts and nobler examples, set off with...vigorous eloquence."

"[Plutarch's Lives are] crowded with very wise maxims and rules of life."

"[Plutarch's Parallel Lives contain] so many beautiful and serious discourses throughout, derived from the deepest and most hidden secrets of moral and natural philosophy, so many wise warnings, and fruitful advice."