Jean Giraudoux Quotes

Jean Giraudoux delivers sharp, witty reflections on love, conflict and the fleeting nature of life.

36 quotes

1. To win a woman in the first place one must please her, then undress her, and then somehow get her clothes back on her. Finally, so she will allow you to leave her, you've got to annoy her.

2. In wartime 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.

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

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

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

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

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

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

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

12. 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.

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

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

15. Only the mediocre are always at their best.

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

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

18. 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...

19. Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

20. 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.

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

22. 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.

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

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

25. 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.

26. 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.

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

28. 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.

29. 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.

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

31. Close your eyes, all you see is yours.

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

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

34. 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?

35. The secret of success is sincerity.

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