Jean Giraudoux Quotations

There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

The brave men die in war. It takes great luck or judgment not to be killed. Once‚ at least‚ the head has to bow and the knee has to bend to danger. The soldiers who march back under the triumphal arches are death's deserters.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.

Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.

Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.

Men don't deceive their wives unless they love them. When they love them most, they deceive them. It's a form of fidelity, their deceit.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

Ask any soldier. To kill a man is to merit a woman.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

A stock certificate is not a tool, like a shovel, or a commodity, like a pound of cheese. What we sell a customer is not a share in a business, but a view of the Elysian Fields. A financier is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!

Agreement is never reached in love. The life of a wife and husband who love each other is never at rest. Whether the marriage is true or false, the marriage portion is the same: elemental discord.

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.

There are no great people. There are only great topics.

It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

The older we women grow, the more clearly we see what men really are: hypocrites, boasters, he-goats. The older men grow, the more they doll us up with every perfection.

Not through discovery but through our fathomlessness do we move confidently through life.

If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song.

When a grown man reaches forty, we change him for an old one. He has completely disappeared. There's only the most superficial resemblance between the two of them. Nothing is handed on from one to the other.

I don't like knowing about other people's feelings. There is nothing more embarrassing. Just as when you play cards and you see your opponent's hand. You are sure to lose.

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.

In times of death and famine, reason is on the side of the priests-who have their own kind of logic which cries for miracles and, on occasion, invents them.

To make ourselves invisible to creditors or to the envious, and even to our own worries, we can take advantage here on earth of a great democratic institution-in fact, democracy's only success-the night.

If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows-it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes to late.

Close your eyes, all you see is yours.

Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.

The man who discovers a woman's weakness is like the huntsman in the heat of the day who finds a cool spring. He wallows in it.

A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.

There's a kind of permission for war which can be given only by the world's mood and atmosphere, the feel of its pulse. It would be madness to undertake a war without that permission.

There are truths which can kill a nation.

The innocent one is he who does not explain, for whom life is both a mystery and a total light, one who does not complain... For innocence admits of neither regret nor dispute. The innocent one assumes all responsibility.

I believe in the gods; or rather I believe that I believe in the gods. But I don't believe that they are great brooding presences watching over us; I believe they are completely absent minded.

All the evil in the world is the fault of the self-styled pure in heart, a result of their eagerness to unearth secrets and expose them to the light of the sun.

Women have no sense of the abstract-a woman admiring the sky is a woman caressing the sky. In a woman's mind beauty is something she needs to touch.

During war we imprison the rights of man.

The spirit of a nation is what counts-the look in its eyes.

To have money is to be virtuous, honest, beautiful and witty And to be without is to be ugly and boring and stupid and useless.

Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune.

Only the mediocre die always at their best. Real leaders are always improving - and raising their bar on how superbly they can perform and how quickly they can move.

Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut.

Oh God, if you want women to never again raise their voices, then create an adult man!

Everyone always dies for his country. If you have lived in it, well and wisely and actively, you die for it too.

Born enemies don't fight. Nations you would say were designed to go to war against each other by their skins, their language, their smell; always jealous of each other, always hating each other; they're not the ones who fight. You will find the real antagonists in nations fate has groomed and made ready for the same war.

Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.

A faithful woman looks to the spring, a good book, perfume, earthquakes, and divine revelation for the experience others find in a lover. They deceive their husbands, so to speak, with the entire world, men excepted.

Young girls are the chatelaines of truth; they must see that it is protected, that the guilty lead the life of the guilty, even if the world rocks on its foundations.

Is a park any better than a coal mine? What's a mountain got that a slag pile hasn't? What would you rather have in your garden--an almond tree or an oil well?

All women are born evil. Some just realize their potential later in life than others.

Death is the next step after the pension-it's perpetual retirement without pay.

Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.

Countries are like fruit-the worms are always inside.

Their own kind of logic which cries for miracles and, on occasion,...

An agreement is never reached in love. The life of a wife and husband who love each other is never at rest. Whether the marriage is true or false, the marriage portion is the same: elemental discord.

A wife loves out of duty, and duty leads to constraint, and constraint kills desire.

You're an Attorney. It's your duty to lie, conceal, and distort everything, and slander everybody.

To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug it to your bosom with all your strength; that's the greatest human happiness.

Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.

Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, youve got it made.

I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.

Half the human race can change its name and sometimes its nation without suffering — at least half! All women!

Who would prefer peace to the glory of hunger and thirst, of wading through mud, and dying in the service of one's country?

Government defines the physical aspects of man by means of The Printed Form, so that for every man in the flesh there is an exactly corresponding man on paper.

In war-time a man is called a hero. It doesn't make him any braver, and he runs for his life. But at least it's a hero who is running away.

A woman is a creature who has discovered her own nature.

To win a woman in the first place you must please her, then undress her, and then somehow get her clothes back on her, finally, so that she will let you leave her, you've got to antagonise her.

The stage play is a trial, not a deed of violence. The soul is opened, like the combination of a safe, by means of a word. You don't require an acetylene torch.

Each day the worst of our faults, our deficiencies, our crimes, the truth of our lives, is stifled under a triple layer of forgetfulness, death and the ordinary course of justice.

When he (man) ceased any longer to heed the words of the seers and prophets, science lovingly brought forth the radio.

There is nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon.