Jean Anouilh Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

A happy love is full of quarrels, you know.

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

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

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

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

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

I like reality. It tastes like bread.

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

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.

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

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

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

An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.

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.

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

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

Have you noticed that 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