Jean Giraudoux Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Jean Giraudoux
Everyone always dies for his country. If you have lived in it, well and wisely and actively, you die for it too.

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

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

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

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

Jean Giraudoux
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
In wartime 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
Nothing is ever so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon

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

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
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