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.
There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that even the most different and contrasting elements can find unity within a person's emotions and heart.
Jean Giraudoux's quote reflects on the human capacity for emotional connection and understanding. It implies that regardless of the diversity and differences one encounters in life—be it in ideas, cultures, or personal experiences—these elements can coexist and be harmonized within an individual's heart. This speaks to the essence of empathy, love, and acceptance that defines the human experience, suggesting that through compassion and emotional openness, one can embrace a wide range of perspectives and feelings.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about empathy and understanding in a multicultural society.
More from Jean Giraudoux
All quotes →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.
Similar quotes
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The trouble with these people is that their cities have never been bombed and their mothers have never been told to shut up.
Every call to worship is a call into the Real World.... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.
I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at all, and carried on without any reference of law, Divine or human.
Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality.