Jean Giraudoux Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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 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
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.

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

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

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

Jean Giraudoux
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
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
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
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
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