Jean Anouilh Quotes

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

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

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

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

What is this mania to love someone all one's life ? Why should we?

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

Things are beautiful if you love them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.

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

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

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

I like reality. It tastes like bread.

The object of art is to give life shape.

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

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

God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saintliness is also a temptation.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What you get free costs too much.

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

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

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

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

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

A happy love is full of quarrels, you know.

An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.

Every man thinks god is on his side.