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.
| 74 quotes | 3,358 visits |
Quotations
| • | Politics is the art of using people. 13 |
| • | The smell is the intelligence of flowers. 9 |
| • | The meaning of the kiss: you are food for me. 6 |
| • | Too quick revenge is no longer revenge; it is a response. 6 |
| • | Happiness writes in white ink on a white page. 6 |
| • | The critic insults the author: this is called criticism. The author insults the critic: this is called insult. 5 |
| • | Life is not taking, it is desire. 5 |
| • | Confidence is one of the divine possibilities of man. 5 |
| • | It is by the audacity of their grammatical mistakes that we recognize the great writers. 5 |
| • | What lasts is indifference. Nothing lasts on a tree more than a dead branch. 5 |
| • | Religion is the venereal disease of mankind. Politics is the cancer. 2 |
| • | Do not lie: it is a defense that is only given to children. 2 |
| • | Everything that is not passion has a background of boredom. 1 |
| • | Vanity is the dominant passion of man. 1 |
| • | If you are not ready to kill what you claim to hate, do not say you hate: you are prostituting that word. 1 |
| • | This great unrecognized spring of so many human behaviors, idleness. 1 |
| • | Our emotions are in our words like stuffed birds. 1 |
| • | A golden rule: do little. 1 |
| • | All that is natural is unfair. 1 |
| • | The greatest service that we can render to a being: to teach him very early to know how to use life. 1 |
| • | The hermit believes he has found God because he has found loneliness. 1 |
| • | There is no merit in being convinced of something. There is no demerit in not being convinced of anything. 1 |
| • | Men can only agree on prejudices. 1 |
| • | Publishing a book is talking at the table in front of the servants. 1 |
| • | There is the real and there is the unreal. Beyond the real and beyond the unreal, there is the deep. 1 |
| • | Memory is the intelligence of fools. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | Youth: time of failures. 1 |
| • | There should be a special way of reading maxims: one page a day, maybe. 1 |
| • | We are old when we need sympathy. It is as sure a sign as the arteries. 1 |
| • | The real strength of style is in the feeling. 1 |
| • | Politics is the art of harnessing the passions of others for your own benefit. 1 |
| • | A woman of thirty-five always looks older than a man of thirty-five. Why ? Because it really is. 1 |
| • | There is nothing more moving in the world than talking seriously to a child. 1 |
| • | Pleasure is as candid as death. Pleasure and the great tragic taste the same, and it is good. 1 |
| • | Revolutions waste a lot of time. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | Let us choose our enemies well. So let us choose our friends well, since these will become those. 1 |
| • | The war has remained for me the most tender human experience that I have lived. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | Dictators are born in the houses where one does not dare to give an order to the maid. 1 |
| • | Melancholy is the little luxury of poor souls. 1 |
| • | The mystery of man is that woman can love him. 1 |
| • | A man without childishness is a monster. 1 |
| • | Man is a monster of inconsistency. 1 |
| • | Since ideals have such an irresistible inclination to disappoint us, it is wisdom to have more than one. 1 |
| • | Almost all human life is corrupted by the need to justify existence. 1 |
| • | You should never say everything, even to a stone. 1 |
| • | Smart men can't be good husbands for the very reason that they don't get married. 1 |
| • | We have two kinds of happiness: the ones we get without harming anyone, and the ones we get by stabbing someone. 1 |
| • | Human stupidity is having a lot of ideas, but stupid ideas. 1 |
| • | There is no government that is not guilty. By what it covers. 1 |
| • | We recognize the free man by being attacked simultaneously or successively by the opposing parties. 1 |
| • | We lie better in writing. 1 |
| • | Dreams are life without memory 1 |
| • | Life becomes a delicious thing, as soon as you decide not to take it seriously anymore. 1 |
| • | It’s not the reality that’s vulgar, it’s the ideal. 1 |
| • | There is only one immortality that would be worth wishing for: it is that of life. 1 |
| • | If you have influence, at least pretend to ignore it. 1 |
| • | Woman’s ideal: to be served in the little things, and to serve in the big ones. 1 |
| • | Some take for friendship what is charity 1 |
| • | A father’s worst anger against his son is more tender than a son's tender love for his father. 1 |
| • | Freedom still exists. You just have to pay the price. 1 |
| • | Hesitation is the hallmark of intelligence. 1 |
| • | Dying for a cause doesn’t make that cause just. 1 |
| • | Long live who abandons me! He returns me to myself. 1 |
| • | By announcing good news, we make ourselves friendly. By announcing bad ones, we make ourselves important: choose. 1 |
| • | After making love, the first to speak says something stupid. 1 |
| • | All women stubbornly revolve around what should burn them. 1 |
| • | Misfortune can only be consoled with the misfortune of others. 1 |
| • | There is no power. There is the abuse of power, nothing else. 1 |
| • | Everyone did not become completely themselves until the day their parents died. 1 |
| • | God only fills us as long as we are empty. 1 |
| • | Everything is a matter of point of view, and misfortune is often only a sign of a false interpretation of life. 1 |
