Jean Giraudoux
Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: War
There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.Collection: Brainy
Only the mediocre are always at their best.Collection: Best
Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.Collection: Wisdom
Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.Collection: Marriage
Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.Collection: Smile
I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Nature
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.Collection: Poetry
The secret of success is sincerity.Collection: Success
Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.Collection: War
One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.
I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.
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.
The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.
It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.
Ask any soldier. To kill a man is to merit a woman.
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.
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.
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
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.
There are no great people. There are only great topics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song.
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.
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.
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!
Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.Collection: Happiness
Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut.Collection: Business
Close your eyes, all you see is yours.Collection: Eye
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.Collection: Funny
All women are born evil. Some just realize their potential later in life than others.Collection: Men
There is nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon.Collection: Afternoon
If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows-it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes to late.Collection: Life
Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: Happiness
A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Marriage
Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.Collection: Loneliness
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.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Women
In times of death and famine, reason is on the side of the priests-who have their own kind of logic which cries for miracles and, on occasion, invents them.Collection: Miracle
Only the mediocre die always at their best. Real leaders are always improving - and raising their bar on how superbly they can perform and how quickly they can move.Collection: Real
To make ourselves invisible to creditors or to the envious, and even to our own worries, we can take advantage here on earth of a great democratic institution-in fact, democracy's only success-the night.Collection: Night
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.Collection: Mean