Quotes from Jean Giraudoux

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.

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

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

During war we imprison the rights of man.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

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

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

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.

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.

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

A golf course is the epitome of all that is transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.

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

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

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

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.

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.

A faithful woman looks to the spring, a good book, perfume, earthquakes, and divine revelation for the experience others find in a lover. They deceive their husbands, so to speak, with the entire world, men excepted.

This woman could call upon the earth and the heavens to do her bidding. But she gave up her power to be human. Write this into your record, Judge—this Ondine was the most human human being that ever lived. She was human by choice.

Nothing is ever so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon.

O Dieu, si tu veux que jamais plus femme n'élève la voix, crée enfin un homme adulte!