Jean Anouilh Quotes

Saintliness is also a temptation.

Death has to be waiting at the end of the ride before you truly see the earth, and feel your heart, and love the world.

Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.

Everything ends this way in France — everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs — everything is a pretext for a good dinner.

It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me

The true masters of the art of living are already happy.

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.

Until the day of his death no man can be sure of his courage.

One cannot weep for the entire world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose.

All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.

Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors. If they only knew that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.

Death is beautiful. It alone gives love its true habitat.

The object of art is to give life shape.

There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will keep me from being happy.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless.

I don't want people to love me. It makes for obligations.

What you get free costs too much.

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.

Believe me; all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

I like reality. It tastes like bread.

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.

Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.

In your efforts to dazzle us your reasoning has gone awry. You know very well that love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

A happy love is full of quarrels, you know.

It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness even to be truly base.

Things are beautiful if you love them.

Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes

Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.

Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy - and that is life.

An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.

It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout - not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.

Obligations, hatreds, injuries; what did I expect my memories to be? I was forgetting remorse. Now I have a complete past.

God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!

A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.

Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.

What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.