Maurice Druon Quotes

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.

Funny weather today,' said the ferryman, bending slowly to his oars. 'In the morning you wake up to such a mist that you can't see two fathoms distance. And then about ten o'clock out comes the sun. One says to oneself "Here's spring on the way". And no sooner said than hailstorms set in for the afternoon. And now the wind's getting up, and there's going to be quite a blow, that's certain. Funny weather.

Socialist ideology is making France go to pot, and the French language with it.

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.

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.

I lived the life of Londoners - and thence comes my immense gratitude and my deep attachment with the British people. I do not think there has ever been a people in the world who displayed a heroism as discreet, as mundane and as universal.

Accursed! Accursed! You shall be accursed to the thirteenth generation!

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.

I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.

I'm doing the best I can. Getting old, that's what it is. I'll be fifty-three at the feast of Saint Michael. I'm no longer as strong as you are, young sirs,' said the ferryman.

Order! As happens with all political blunderers, the word was ceaselessly upon his lips, and nothing could have persuaded him to admit that the world had changed even a little in the last century.

I love English. I learned it from the speeches of Winston Churchill.

How, then, did it happen that this same France forty years later came to be crushed on the battlefield by a nation it outnumbered fivefold? Why should its noblemen be split up into factions, its bourgeoisie in revolt, its people overwhelmed by excessive taxation, its provinces lawless and plagued by roving gangs engaged in pillaging and crime, all authority flouted, the currency weakened, trade at a standstill, and poverty and violence rife everywhere? Why this collapse? What caused this reversal of fortune? It was mediocrity. The mediocrity of just a few kings, their vanity and self-importance, their frivolousness in the conduct of their affairs, their inability to attract talented advisors, their nonchalance, their presumptuousness, their failure to draw up grand designs or even to follow those already conceived.

The hand of God strikes swiftly, particularly when assisted by the hand of man.

Mediocrities can tolerate being surrounded only by flatterers who conceal their mediocrity.

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.

I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth.

Anarchy is as detestable in grammar as it is in society.

Every unjust act, even committed for the sake of a just cause, carries its curse with it.

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.

Beside London Bridge, the Ponte Vecchio at Florence seemed but a mere trifle in Guccio's memory, and the Arno a brook compared with the Thames. He said so to his companion. 'All the same we teach them everything,' the latter replied.

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

Peoples bear the weight of curses longer than the princes who incur them.

Number is the Word but is not utterance it is wave and light, though no one sees it it is rhythm and music, though no one hears it. Its variations are limitless and yet it is immutable. Each form of life is a particular reverberation of Number.