Jean Giraudoux Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Jean Giraudoux
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.

Jean Giraudoux
To win a woman in the first place one must please her, then undress her, and then somehow get her clothes back on her. Finally, so she will allow you to leave her, you've got to annoy her.

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

Jean Giraudoux
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
COUNTESS: I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us — and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star.

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

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

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

Jean Giraudoux
Born enemies don't fight. Nations you would say were designed to go to war against each other — by their skins, their language, their smell: always jealous of each other, always hating each other — they're not the ones who fight. You will find the real antagonists in nations fate has groomed and made ready for the same war.

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

Jean Giraudoux
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
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
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
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.

Jean Giraudoux
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