Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Anouilh
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French playwright Jean Anouilh.
Last updated on November 4, 2024.
An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.
God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.
Nothing is irreparable in politics.
Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.
Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.
What you get free costs too much.
Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.
A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.
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.
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.
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.
The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.
What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating.
All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.
One cannot weep for the entire world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose.
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.
Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.
Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path.
Every man thinks god is on his side.
With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.
Men create real miracles when they use their God-given courage and intelligence.
Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.
It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base.
Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy - and that is life.
A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.
Things are beautiful if you love them.
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.
Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
I like reality. It tastes like bread.
Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.
Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
I don't want people to love me. It makes for obligations.
Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path
There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will keep me from being happy.
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.
It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me
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.
The object of art is to give life shape.
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
Everything ends this way in France — everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs — everything is a pretext for a good dinner.
My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.
Life consists of nothing more than the happiness we can get out of it.
Rien n'est vrai que ce qu'on ne dit pas. Nothing is true except that which is unsaid.
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.
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
Believe me; all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.
The true masters of the art of living are already happy.
However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.
Death is beautiful. It alone gives love its true habitat.
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.
Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.
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.
Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.
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.
Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
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