Jean Anouilh Quotes

We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.

Believe me; all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.

Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors. If they only knew that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.

Each of us has a day .. when he has to accept, finally, the fact that he is a man.

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.

The object of art is to give life shape.

Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy - and that is life.

Things are beautiful if you love them.

God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.

What you get free costs too much.

Life is a child playing round your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden.

All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.

Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path

Men create real miracles when they use their God-given courage and intelligence.

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.

Je sais de quelles petitesses meurent les plus grandes amours. I know how pettiness ruins the greatest loves.

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know ... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.

There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.

Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.

Saintliness is also a temptation.

What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.

I like reality. It tastes like bread.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.

God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.

Until the day of his death no man can be sure of his courage.

Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.

It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout - not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.

Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes

Everything ends this way in France — everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs — everything is a pretext for a good dinner.

An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.

Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.

One cannot weep for the entire world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose.

All children are sweet at five. But at twelve they begin to get silly.