Quotes by Jean Giraudoux

• Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.
• As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
• I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.
• A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.
• 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.
• Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.
• There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
• The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
• Only the mediocre are always at their best.
• One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.
• It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.
• 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.
• 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.
• The secret of success is sincerity.
• 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.
• 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.
• I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.