Jean Giraudoux Quotes & Sayings

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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! — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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

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? — Jean Giraudoux

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

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

There are no great people. There are only great topics. — Jean Giraudoux

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

The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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

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

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

Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you. — Jean Giraudoux

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

There are truths which can kill a nation. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

During war we imprison the rights of man. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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

Close your eyes, all you see is yours. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

The secret of success is sincerity. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made. — Jean Giraudoux

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

Countries are like fruit-the worms are always inside. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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

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

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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

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

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. — Jean Giraudoux

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