Explore Quotes by Jean Giraudoux

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.

Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?

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

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.

The secret of success is sincerity.

If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song.

I don't like knowing about other people's feelings. There is nothing more embarrassing. Just as when you play cards and you see your opponent's hand. You are sure to lose.

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.

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

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

A woman is a creature who has discovered her own nature.

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.