Top 84 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Giraudoux
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Jean Giraudoux.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
A stock certificate is not a tool, like a shovel, or a commodity, like a pound of cheese. What we sell a customer is not a share in a business, but a view of the Elysian Fields. A financier is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!
It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.
The secret of success is sincerity.
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.
A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.
Ask any soldier. To kill a man is to merit a woman.
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 brave men die in war. It takes great luck or judgment not to be killed. Once, at least, the head has to bow and the knee has to bend to danger. The soldiers who march back under the triumphal arches are death's deserters.
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.
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
When a grown man reaches forty, we change him for an old one. He has completely disappeared. There's only the most superficial resemblance between the two of them. Nothing is handed on from one to the other.
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.
I don't like knowing about other people's feelings. There is nothing more embarrassing. Just as when you play cards and you see your opponent's hand. You are sure to lose.
If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song.
There are no great people. There are only great topics.
The older we women grow, the more clearly we see what men really are: hypocrites, boasters, he-goats. The older men grow, the more they doll us up with every perfection.
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.
Men don't deceive their wives unless they love them. When they love them most, they deceive them. It's a form of fidelity, their deceit.
Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.
There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
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.
I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.
The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.
Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.
Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.
One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.
Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?
I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.
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.
Close your eyes, all you see is yours.
Oh God, if you want women to never again raise their voices, then create an adult man!
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.
A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.
Half the human race can change its name and sometimes its nation without suffering — at least half! All women!
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.
Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.
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.
Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.
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.
Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.
Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.
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.
The innocent one is he who does not explain, for whom life is both a mystery and a total light, one who does not complain... For innocence admits of neither regret nor dispute. The innocent one assumes all responsibility.
To make ourselves invisible to creditors or to the envious, and even to our own worries, we can take advantage here on earth of a great democratic institution-in fact, democracy's only success-the night.
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.
All women are born evil. Some just realize their potential later in life than others.
There is nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon.
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?
Death is the next step after the pension-it's perpetual retirement without pay.
Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.
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 wife loves out of duty, and duty leads to constraint, and constraint kills desire.
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.
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