Explore Quotes by Jean Giraudoux

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Who would prefer peace to the glory of hunger and thirst, of wading through mud, and dying in the service of one's country?

Half the human race can change its name and sometimes its nation without suffering — at least half! All women!

Their own kind of logic which cries for miracles and, on occasion.

There are truths which can kill a nation.

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.

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.

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 wife loves out of duty, and duty leads to constraint, and constraint kills desire.

You're an Attorney. It's your duty to lie, conceal, and distort everything, and slander everybody.

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.

Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.