Jean Anouilh Quotations

It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base.

Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.

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

We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

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

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.

Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.

One cannot weep for the entire world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose.

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

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.

Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.

An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.

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

Men create real miracles when they use their God-given courage and intelligence.

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.

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

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path

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

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

God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.

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

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.

Every man thinks god is on his side.

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

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?

All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

Have you noticed that life, real honest to goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy /common clay, if you like /eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others /the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past . . . And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

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

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me

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

Saintliness is also a temptation.

It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout - not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.

I don't want people to love me. It makes for obligations.

The true masters of the art of living are already happy...

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes

A happy love is full of quarrels, you know.

Each of us has a day .. when he has to accept, finally, the fact that he is a man.

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

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

The object of art is to give life shape.

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

We have found other terms far less vague than the old ones to designate the same complaints. It's a great advance linguistically.

One can be a patriot, you know, without making one's wife join the breadline.

However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.

My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.

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

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

Chacun de nous a un jour, plus ou moins triste, plus ou moins lointain, o u' il doit enfin accepter d'e" tre un homme. There will come a day for each of us, more or less sad, more or less distant, whenwe must accept the condition of being human.

Il y aura toujours un chien perdu quelque part qui m'empe" chera d'e" tre heureux. There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will prevent me being happy.

Rien n'est vrai que ce qu'on ne dit pas. Nothing is true except that which is unsaid.

Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless.

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

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

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.

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know ... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

In matters of money there's no such thing as enough.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!

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.

Death is beautiful. It alone gives love its true habitat.

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.

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

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.

Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.

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

Things are beautiful if you love them.

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

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.

I like reality. It tastes like bread.

What you get free costs too much.

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