Jean Anouilh Quotes (50 Quotes)



    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.

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

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



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


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


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

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

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


    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.

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

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

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

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

    True miracles are created by men when they use the courage and intelligence that God gave them.

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

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

    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.

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


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


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

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

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




    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.

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

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

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.

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

    Talent is like a faucet while it is open, you have to write.

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

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

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

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

    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.


    More Jean Anouilh Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Life - God - Man - Love - Courage - Tragedy - Reality - Inspirational - Death & Dying - Beauty - Money & Wealth - Mastery & Expertise - World - Hope - Heroism - Past - Genius - Mind - Enemy - View All Jean Anouilh Quotations

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