Top 60 Jean Giraudoux Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, youve got it made.”

— Jean Giraudoux

2. “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

— Jean Giraudoux

3. “Only the mediocre die always at their best. Real leaders are always improving – and raising their bar on how superbly they can perform and how quickly they can move.”

— Jean Giraudoux

4. “Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.”

— Jean Giraudoux

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

— Jean Giraudoux

6. “A man’s name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.”

— Jean Giraudoux

7. “All women are born evil. Some just realize their potential later in life than others.”

— Jean Giraudoux

8. “Close your eyes, all you see is yours.”

— Jean Giraudoux

9. “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.”

— Jean Giraudoux

10. “If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows-it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes to late.”

— Jean Giraudoux

11. “Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.”

— Jean Giraudoux

12. “Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don’t do anything, they don’t make anything – they just stand there and take their cut.”

— Jean Giraudoux

13. “Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.”

— Jean Giraudoux

14. “Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune.”

— Jean Giraudoux

15. “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.”

— Jean Giraudoux

16. “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.”

— Jean Giraudoux

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

— Jean Giraudoux

18. “There is nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can’t set it right in the course of an afternoon.”

— Jean Giraudoux

19. “Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.”

— Jean Giraudoux

20. “The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.”

— Jean Giraudoux

21. “To have money is to be virtuous, honest, beautiful and witty And to be without is to be ugly and boring and stupid and useless.”

— Jean Giraudoux

22. “Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.”

— Jean Giraudoux

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

— Jean Giraudoux

24. “You’re an Attorney. It’s your duty to lie, conceal, and distort everything, and slander everybody.”

— Jean Giraudoux

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

— Jean Giraudoux

26. “Women have no sense of the abstract-a woman admiring the sky is a woman caressing the sky. In a woman’s mind beauty is something she needs to touch.”

— Jean Giraudoux

27. “It’s odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.”

— Jean Giraudoux

28. “There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.”

— Jean Giraudoux

29. “I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.”

— Jean Giraudoux

30. “Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.”

— Jean Giraudoux

31. “Is a park any better than a coal mine? What’s a mountain got that a slag pile hasn’t? What would you rather have in your garden – an almond tree or an oil well?”

— Jean Giraudoux

32. “To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug it to your bosom with all your strength; that’s the greatest human happiness.”

— Jean Giraudoux

33. “Death is the next step after the pension-it’s perpetual retirement without pay.”

— Jean Giraudoux

34. “Oh God, if you want women to never again raise their voices, then create an adult man!”

— Jean Giraudoux

35. “A woman is a creature who has discovered her own nature.”

— Jean Giraudoux

36. “Countries are like fruit-the worms are always inside.”

— Jean Giraudoux

37. “A faithful woman looks to the spring, a good book, perfume, earthquakes, and divine revelation for the experience others find in a lover. They deceive their husbands, so to speak, with the entire world, men excepted.”

— Jean Giraudoux

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

— Jean Giraudoux

39. “To win a woman in the first place you must please her, then undress her, and then somehow get her clothes back on her, finally, so that she will let you leave her, you’ve got to antagonise her.”

— Jean Giraudoux

40. “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.”

— Jean Giraudoux

41. “Who would prefer peace to the glory of hunger and thirst, of wading through mud, and dying in the service of one’s country?”

— Jean Giraudoux

42. “An 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.”

— Jean Giraudoux

43. “Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.”

— Jean Giraudoux

44. “In war-time a man is called a hero. It doesn’t make him any braver, and he runs for his life. But at least it’s a hero who is running away.”

— Jean Giraudoux

45. “There are truths which can kill a nation.”

— Jean Giraudoux

46. “There’s a kind of permission for war which can be given only by the world’s mood and atmosphere, the feel of its pulse. It would be madness to undertake a war without that permission.”

— Jean Giraudoux

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

— Jean Giraudoux

48. “Everyone, when there’s war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.”

— Jean Giraudoux

49. “The man who discovers a woman’s weakness is like the huntsman in the heat of the day who finds a cool spring. He wallows in it.”

— Jean Giraudoux

50. “The spirit of a nation is what counts-the look in its eyes.”

— Jean Giraudoux