War & Peace Quote by Andre Maurois

Maurois is dressing up a blunt social weapon as moral insight: your “treatment” of others doesn’t just reflect what you think of them, it manufactures the version of them you then claim to observe. The line works because it flips a comfortable hierarchy. The scornful observer imagines he’s merely recognizing stupidity; Maurois suggests he’s producing it, turning “average intelligence” into performative foolishness through humiliation. Scorn isn’t neutral judgment, it’s a stage direction.

The gendered split is the sharpest (and most dated) part of the quote. Men become “fools” under ridicule; women become “enemies” under indifference, and can be “angels” if “well treated.” That’s both revealing and strategically manipulative: it grants the speaker enormous power while smuggling in a paternalistic fantasy of female virtue as something unlocked by proper handling. The subtext isn’t simply “be kind.” It’s a warning about the social alchemy of respect and the violence of casual disdain, especially in intimate or dependent relationships where a look, a shrug, a chill can reorganize someone’s sense of self.

Placed in Maurois’s early-20th-century milieu - salons, class markers, manners as social currency - the observation lands as etiquette with teeth. He’s diagnosing how contempt functions as an instrument of control: it doesn’t just hurt, it hardens. Treat people like caricatures and they’ll eventually play the part, not because they are that way, but because you’ve made their dignity too expensive to maintain.