Jean Anouilh Quotes

We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.

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

The object of art is to give life a shape.

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

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

Each of us has a day .. when he has to accept, finally, the fact that he is a man.

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

The object of art is to give life shape.

Things are beautiful if you love them.

What you get free costs too much.

God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.

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

Life is a child playing round your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden.

Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.

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.

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.

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

Men create real miracles when they use their God-given courage and intelligence.

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

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.

Je sais de quelles petitesses meurent les plus grandes amours. I know how pettiness ruins the greatest loves.

Saintliness is also a temptation.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

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

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

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

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

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

I like reality. It tastes like bread.

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

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

God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!

An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.

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

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.

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

Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

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

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

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

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.

Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.

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

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

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

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.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

In matters of money there's no such thing as enough.