1.
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
Jean Giraudoux
2.
Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.
Jean Giraudoux
3.
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
4.
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
5.
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
6.
I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
Jean Giraudoux
7.
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
8.
One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.
Jean Giraudoux
9.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Jean Giraudoux
10.
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
11.
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
12.
All women are born evil. Some just realize their potential later in life than others.
Jean Giraudoux
13.
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
14.
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
15.
Close your eyes, all you see is yours.
Jean Giraudoux
16.
There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
Jean Giraudoux
17.
Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.
Jean Giraudoux
18.
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
19.
Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.
Jean Giraudoux
20.
Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.
Jean Giraudoux
21.
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
22.
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
23.
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
24.
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
25.
Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.
Jean Giraudoux
26.
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
27.
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.
Jean Giraudoux
28.
There is nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon.
Jean Giraudoux
29.
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
30.
Countries are like fruit-the worms are always inside.
Jean Giraudoux
31.
Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune.
Jean Giraudoux
32.
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
33.
Death is the next step after the pension-it's perpetual retirement without pay.
Jean Giraudoux
34.
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
35.
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
36.
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
37.
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
38.
There are truths which can kill a nation.
Jean Giraudoux
39.
Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.
Jean Giraudoux
40.
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
41.
Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.
Jean Giraudoux
42.
You're an Attorney. It's your duty to lie, conceal, and distort everything, and slander everybody.
Jean Giraudoux
43.
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
44.
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
Jean Giraudoux
45.
Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.
Jean Giraudoux
46.
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
47.
A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.
Jean Giraudoux
48.
Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?
Jean Giraudoux
49.
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
50.
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
