Jean Giraudoux

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

When a grown man reaches forty, we change him for an old one. He has completely disappeared. There's only the most superficial resemblance between the two of them. Nothing is handed on from one to the other.

A stock certificate is not a tool, like a shovel, or a commodity, like a pound of cheese. What we sell a customer is not a share in a business, but a view of the Elysian Fields. A financier is a creative artist. Our function is to stimulate the imagination. We are poets!

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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