Quotes from Jean Giraudoux

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.

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

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.

Oh God, if you want women to never again raise their voices, then create an adult man!

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

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.

I believe in the gods. Or rather, I believe that I believe in the gods. But I don't believe that they are great brooding presences watching over us; I believe they are completely absent-minded.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

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

I forgot they were talking about me. They sound so wonderfully convincing.

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

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.

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

A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.

Government defines the physical aspects of man by means of The Printed Form, so that for every man in the flesh there is an exactly corresponding man on paper.

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.

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.

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

Women have no sense of the abstract-a woman admiring the sky is a woman caressing the sky. In a woman's mind beauty is something she needs to touch.

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.

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.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.