Jean Giraudoux Quotes

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

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

Close your eyes, all you see is yours.

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.

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.

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

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.

Countries are like fruit-the worms are always inside.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

During war we imprison the rights of man.

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.

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.

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

There are truths which can kill a nation.

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

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

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

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

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

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