The greedy search for money or success will almost always lead men into unhappiness. Why? Because that kind of life makes them depend upon things outside themselves.
Andre MauroisRead
Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that every story involves a disillusionment or loss of innocence.
Andre Maurois emphasizes the universal theme in literature where characters often experience a loss of illusion, leading to personal growth or transformation. This concept reflects the depth and complexity of human experiences, showing that through the journey of life and storytelling, individuals come to terms with reality, moving from naive expectations to a clearer understanding of their circumstances.
Themes
IllusionDisillusionmentLiteratureNovelTruth
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote during a book club discussion to highlight character development.
More from Andre Maurois
All quotes →It is better to teach a few things perfectly than many things indifferently...
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We can talk frankly about our defects only to those who recognise our qualities.
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Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
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If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny.
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A man cannot free himself from the past more easily than he can from his own body.
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Similar quotes
A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
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Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.
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That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.
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She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.
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Nobody ever asks me why my characters don't text each other. Besides, as soon as you put something 'electronic' in a book, it's already out of date by the time it's published: everything will have changed. Human emotion, on the other hand, will never change.
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Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Stephen KingRead