Maurice Druon > Quotes

“Every man believes to some extent that the world began when he was born and, at the moment of leaving it, suffers at having to let the Universe remain unfinished.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“It must be admitted that such things were common coin of the period. Kingdoms were often handed over to adolescents, whose absolute power fasinated them as might a game. Hardly grown out of the age in which it is fun to tear the wings from flies, they might now amuse themselves by tearing the heads from men. Too young to fear or even imagine death, they would not hesitate to distribute it around them.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“Every unjust act, even committed for the sake of a just cause, carries its curse with it.”
― Maurice Druon

“Mediocrities can tolerate being surrounded only by flatterers who conceal their mediocrity.”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“First love is the only pure and happy one. If it goes wrong, nothing can replace it. Later loves can never attain to the same limpid perfection; though they may be as solid, as marble, they are streaked with veins of another colour, the dried blood of the past.”
― Maurice Druon, La flor de lis y el león

“It is thus that imagination can in the end determine destiny, and it but needs our future actions to be given shape in speech so that we are obliged to give them the reality of accomplishment.”
― Maurice Druon, La reina estrangulada

“Days lived, whether full or empty, whether busy or serene, are but days gone by, and the ashes of the past weigh the same in every hand.”
― Maurice Druon, La ley de los varones

“I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“The Queen watched the drops of sweat pearling her husband's brow. And nothing disgusts a woman more than the sweat of the man she has ceased to love.”
― Maurice Druon, La loba de Francia

“Il y a dans l'Histoire une singulière lignée, toujours renouvelée, de fanatiques de l'ordre. Voués à une idole abstraite et absolue, pour eux les vie humaines ne sont d'aucune valeur si elles attentent au dogme des institutions; et l'on dirait qu'ils ont oublié que la collectivité qu'ils servent est composée d'hommes. (partie 2, chapitre 9)”
― Maurice Druon, Les Rois maudits

“Several Mohammedan countries in North Africa and the Middle East are precisely in a period of fourteenth-century development and can show us, in a number of respects, a reflection of what the European medieval world was like. Similar towns, their houses piled one upon another, narrow swarming streets, enclosing a few sumptuous palaces; the same extremes of appalling misery among the poor and of opulence among great lords; the same story-tellers at the corners of the streets, propagating both myths and news; the same population, nine-tenths illiterate, submitting through long years to oppression and then suddenly rebelling violently in murderous panic; the same influence of religious conscience upon public affairs; the same fanaticism; the same intrigues among the powerful; the same hate among rival factions; the same plots so curiously ravelled that their solution lies only in the spilling of blood!”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“There is a singular strand running through history, always renewing itself, that of fanatics for the general good and for the written law. Logical to the point of inhumanity, pitiless towards others as towards themselves, these servants of abstract gods and of absolute law accept the role of executioners, because they wish to be the last executioner. They deceive themselves because, once dead, the world no longer obeys them.”
― Maurice Druon, The Accursed Kings Series: The Iron King / The Strangled Queen / The Poisoned Crown

“Even when we are punished for the wrong reasons, there is always a real cause for our punishment. Every unjust act, even committed for the sake of a just cause, carries its curse with it.”
― Maurice Druon, La reina estrangulada

“Accursed! Accursed! You shall be accursed to the thirteenth generation!”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“When one has governed men for a long time, when one has thought that one has acted for the best, when one knows the pains the task has entailed, and then suddenly sees that one has never been either loved or understood, but merely submitted to, then one is overwhelmed with bitterness, and wonders whether one could not have found some better way of spending one’s life.”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“But nations never die of the death of a man, however great he may have been; their birth and their death derive from other causes.”
― Maurice Druon, La reina estrangulada

“The people are always prepared to shout on the side of power and to make a noise when it costs them nothing”
― Maurice Druon

“The hand of God strikes swiftly, particularly when assisted by the hand of man.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“There's the gratitude of sons-in-law for you. You poison a king so that they may take his place, and then they do exactly as they please without consideration for anyone!”
― Maurice Druon, The Royal Succession

“The curse did not come from God. It emanated from himself and had no other source but in his own actions; and this was true of every man and of every punishment.”
― Maurice Druon, La reina estrangulada

“For, in those centuries, when numbers of children died in the cradle and half the women in childbirth, when epidemics ravaged adult life, when wounds were but rarely cured, and sores did not heal, when the Church’s teaching was ceaselessly directed towards a consciousness of sin, when the statues in the sanctuaries showed worms gnawing at corpses, when each one carried throughout his life the spectre of his own decomposition before his eyes and the idea of death was habitual, natural and familiar, to be present at a man’s last breath was not, as it is for us, a tragic reminder of our common destiny.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“There are no advantageous defeats, but there can be disastrous victories.”
― Maurice Druon, La flor de lis y el león

“В то утро многие, развертывая газеты, задавали себе вопрос, за какие такие заслуги господин Эмиль Лартуа был избран в члены Французской академии. И лишь немногие знали, что этой высокой чести был удостоен - только ли за свои труды? - человек действительно недюжинный, который был способен и читать Евангелие на греческом языке, и соблазнять женщин в автомобиле, и проводить время в кабаках, и появляться под утро в больнице, чтобы попытаться спасти умирающего ребенка.”
― Maurice Druon, Les Grandes Familles

“For in truth the years have little effect on our nature and age does not free us of our faults. We lose our hair more quickly than our weaknesses.”
― Maurice Druon, La loba de Francia

“You know what the common people are like,’ said Artevelde; ‘they never know their own strength till the moment for using it has passed.”
― Maurice Druon, La flor de lis y el león

“—¿Tuvisteis buena travesía?
—Execrable, señora, horrorosa —respondió Roberto—. Una tempestad como para echar tripas y alma. Creí llegada mi última hora, hasta el extremo de que decidí confesar mis pecados a Dios. Por fortuna, eran tantos, que al tiempo de decir la mitad ya llegábamos a destino. Guardo suficientes para el regreso.”
― Maurice Druon

“Nothing moves an older man more than a confession of inexperience from a younger, particularly if the latter be his social superior.”
― Maurice Druon, The Royal Succession

“Nous autres banquiers nous sommes un peu comme les prêtres, Monseigneur. Vous confessez les âmes ; nous confessons les bourses, et sommes nous aussi tenus au secret.”
― Maurice Druon, Les Rois maudits

“A man who would agree to betray his own conscience for the sake of a mitre, might well also steal and betray.”
― Maurice Druon, The Iron King

“He was held in great respect. Who remembered now that he was a forger, a perjurer, a murderer and something of a sorcerer? Who would have dared remind him of it? He was Monseigneur Robert, a giant beginning to grow old but still possessed of surprising strength and immense self-assurance, who, invariably dressed in red, was leading an English army into France. Nor did it matter to him that his soldiers were foreigners. Indeed, this was not the sort of thing to which any count, baron or knight gave a thought. Their campaigns were family matters; their battles quarrels over inheritance; the enemy was a cousin, the ally another. It was to the population who would be massacred, whose houses would be burnt, barns looted and women raped, that the word foreigner meant enemy; not to the princes who were defending their titles and asserting their rights.”
― Maurice Druon, La flor de lis y el león