Jean Giraudoux famous quotes

Only the mediocre are always at their best.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Inspirational #Motivational #Mediocrity

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

#Happiness #Broken Heart #Heartbroken

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

#Flower #Example

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

#Death #Order #Games

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

#Love #Heart #Men

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Exercise #Law #Imagination

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Life #Years #Two

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

#Privilege #Witness #Catastrophe

There are truths which can kill a nation.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Truth

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Husband #Spring #Women

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Mean #Play #Soul

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Women #Winning #Clothes

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

#War #Rhyming #Impossible

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

#Creatures

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Smile

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

#Men #Demise #Earth

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

#Stupid #Hands #Voice

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Real #Moving #Leader

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Heart #Light #Self

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Women #Sky #Mind

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

#Men #Evil #Realizing

During war we imprison the rights of man.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#War #Men #Rights

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

#War #Air #Elements

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

#Years #Fifty #Able

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Business #Taken #Cutting

Who would prefer peace to the glory of hunger and thirst, of wading through mud, and dying in the service of one's country?
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Country #Dying #Mud

Half the human race can change its name and sometimes its nation without suffering — at least half! All women!
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Race #Names #Suffering

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

#Miracle #Logic #Kind

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Beauty #Beautiful #Fashion

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Years #People #Way

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

#Inspirational #Marriage #Husband

I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Giving #Pimp #Agents

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, youve got it made.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Trust #Betrayal #Fake

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Water #Secret #Substance

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

#Men #Class #Names

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Golf #Space #Epitome

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Believe #Brooding #Agnosticism

A wife loves out of duty, and duty leads to constraint, and constraint kills desire.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Marriage #Wedding #Wife

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#War #Atmosphere #World

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

#Death #Dying #Horror

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Happiness #Pain #Giving

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

#Lying #Law #Duty

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Spring #Men #Weakness

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Marriage #Wedding #Husband

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?
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Garden #Oil #Tree

Young girls are the chatelaines of truth; they must see that it is protected, that the guilty lead the life of the guilty, even if the world rocks on its foundations.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Girl #Rocks #Foundation

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Regret #Responsibility #Light

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Night #Worry #Democracy

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

#Believe #Men #Half

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

#People #Waiting #Odd

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Mean #Men #Paper

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Miracle #Sides #Logic

Countries are like fruit-the worms are always inside.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Country #Fruit #Corruption

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

#Destiny #Each Day #Logic

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

#Death #Retirement #Next Steps

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Running #War #Hero

Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Lying #Jockeys #Falsehood

The spirit of a nation is what counts-the look in its eyes.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Eye #Looks #Spirit

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.
-- Jean Giraudoux

#Beautiful #Witty #Money