Jean Giraudoux Quotes

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Close your eyes, all you see is yours.

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

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.

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

An 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.

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

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.

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

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

Countries are like fruit-the worms are always inside.

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

There are truths which can kill a nation.

Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.

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.

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?

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

Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

During war we imprison the rights of man.

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.

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.

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

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