Jean Giraudoux Quotes
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Only the mediocre are always at their best.
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I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
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There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
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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.
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If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song.
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The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
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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.
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Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.
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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.
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Born enemies don't fight. Nations you would say were designed to go to war against each other - by their skins, their language, their smell: always jealous of each other, always hating each other - they're not the ones who fight. You will find the real antagonists in nations fate has groomed and made ready for the same war.
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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.
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One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.
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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.
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Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.
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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.
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As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
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Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.
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You are a lawyer! On the contrary, you have the duty to use all the tricks to defend your clients. To lie. To slander.
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Everyone always dies for his country. If you have lived in it, well and wisely and actively, you die for it too.
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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.