Jean Giraudoux

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

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!

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

There are no great people. There are only great topics.

The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.

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.

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

It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

The secret of success is sincerity.

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

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

I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.