Top 50 Jean Anouilh Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is love of course. And then there’s life, its enemy.”

— Jean Anouilh

2. “Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.”

— Jean Anouilh

3. “The object of art is to give life shape.”

— Jean Anouilh

4. “Everything ends this way in France – everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs – everything is a pretext for a good dinner.”

— Jean Anouilh

5. “Things are beautiful if you love them.”

— Jean Anouilh

6. “Life is a child playing round your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden.”

— Jean Anouilh

7. “The garden was still asleep. I caught it unawares. A garden that hasn’t yet begun to think about people. Beautiful.”

— Jean Anouilh

8. “Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.”

— Jean Anouilh

9. “Death is beautiful. It alone gives love its true habitat.”

— Jean Anouilh

10. “My part is not a heroic one, but I shall play my part.”

— Jean Anouilh

11. “Our entire life – consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.”

— Jean Anouilh

12. “Nothing is true but what is never said.”

— Jean Anouilh

13. “Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy – and that is life.”

— Jean Anouilh

14. “Nothing is irreparable in politics.”

— Jean Anouilh

15. “Beauty, real beauty, is something very grave. If there is a God, He must be partly that.”

— Jean Anouilh

16. “Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.”

— Jean Anouilh

17. “Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless.”

— Jean Anouilh

18. “Rien n’est vrai que ce qu’on ne dit pas. Nothing is true except that which is unsaid.”

— Jean Anouilh

19. “In matters of money there’s no such thing as enough.”

— Jean Anouilh

20. “I don’t want people to love me. It makes for obligations.”

— Jean Anouilh

21. “Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.”

— Jean Anouilh

22. “Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.”

— Jean Anouilh

23. “Death has to be waiting at the end of the ride before you truly see the earth, and feel your heart, and love the world.”

— Jean Anouilh

24. “What will my happiness be like? What kind of happy woman will Antigone grow into? What base things will she have to do, day after day, in order to snatch her own little scrap of happiness? Tell me – who will she have to lie to? Smile at? Sell herself to? Who will she have to avert her eyes from, and leave to die?”

— Jean Anouilh

25. “There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will keep me from being happy.”

— Jean Anouilh

26. “Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path.”

— Jean Anouilh

27. “Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books – but it is terrible when one has to live it.”

— Jean Anouilh

28. “Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they’re old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors. If they only knew that it’s enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.”

— Jean Anouilh

29. “Until the day of his death no man can be sure of his courage.”

— Jean Anouilh

30. “The true masters of the art of living are already happy...”

— Jean Anouilh

31. “Believe me; all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.”

— Jean Anouilh

32. “Life consists of nothing more than the happiness we can get out of it.”

— Jean Anouilh

33. “God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!”

— Jean Anouilh

34. “An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.”

— Jean Anouilh

35. “Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.”

— Jean Anouilh

36. “A happy love is full of quarrels, you know.”

— Jean Anouilh

37. “All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.”

— Jean Anouilh

38. “All children are sweet at five. But at twelve they begin to get silly.”

— Jean Anouilh

39. “It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn’t waiting for me.”

— Jean Anouilh

40. “Je sais de quelles petitesses meurent les plus grandes amours. I know how pettiness ruins the greatest loves.”

— Jean Anouilh

41. “In your efforts to dazzle us your reasoning has gone awry. You know very well that love is, above all, the gift of oneself.”

— Jean Anouilh

42. “Saintliness is also a temptation.”

— Jean Anouilh

43. “With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it’s not just a trick of the devil.”

— Jean Anouilh

44. “Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.”

— Jean Anouilh

45. “What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating.”

— Jean Anouilh

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46. “Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.”

— Jean Anouilh

47. “Obligations, hatreds, injuries; what did I expect my memories to be? I was forgetting remorse. Now I have a complete past.”

— Jean Anouilh

48. “Life’s not what you think. It’s like water – the young let it slip through their fingers without thinking. Shut your hands, Antigone, shut them tight and hold it back. You’ll see – it’ll turn into something small and hard that you can sit and munch in the sun.”

— Jean Anouilh

49. “The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.”

— Jean Anouilh

50. “A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.”

— Jean Anouilh