Only the mediocre are always at their best.
Jean Giraudoux
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.
The secret of success is sincerity.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.
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 should only believe half of what women say. But which half?
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.
Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.
Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.
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.
There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
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.
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.
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 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.
There are no great people. There are only great topics.
Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
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's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.
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.
Ask any soldier. To kill a man is to merit a woman.
The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.
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.
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.
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.
