Top 20 Jean Giraudoux Quotes

I have been a woman for fifty years, and I’ve never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

Men don’t deceive their wives unless they love them. When they love them most, they deceive them. It’s a form of fidelity, their deceit.

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.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

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.

There are no great people. There are only great topics.

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.

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

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

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

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.

It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.

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

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

Ask any soldier. To kill a man is to merit a woman.

The older we women grow, the more clearly we see what men really are: hypocrites, boasters, he-goats. The older men grow, the more they doll us up with every perfection.

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

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

The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.