71+ Jean Anouilh Quotes On Friendship, Dramatic And Absurdist

Jean Anouilh was a French playwright and one of the most influential dramatists of the 20th century. He wrote over 50 plays in a career that spanned from the 1930s to the 1960s, often exploring themes of human suffering and tragedy. His most famous works include Antigone, Eurydice, and Becket, which were adapted into films. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jean Anouilh on love, friendship, dramatic.

Top 10 Jean Anouilh Quotes

1. There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.
2. However tight I shut my eyes, there will always be a stray dog somewhere in the world who'll stop me being happy.
3. Believe me; all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.
4. Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
5. The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.
6. What you get free costs too much.
7. Each of us has a day .. when he has to accept, finally, the fact that he is a man.
8. Things are beautiful if you love them.
9. God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.
10. Saintliness is also a temptation.

Jean Anouilh Short Quotes

• Effective action is always unjust.
• Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.
• 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.
• Nothing is irreparable in politics.
• Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
• Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.
• God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!
• Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.
• An ugly sight, a man who is afraid.

Jean Anouilh Quotes About Love

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

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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

A happy love is full of quarrels, you know. — Jean Anouilh

Death is beautiful. It alone gives love its true habitat. — Jean Anouilh

Jean Anouilh Quotes About Life

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It's easy to say no, even if it means dying. — Jean Anouilh

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

Jean Anouilh Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Jean Anouilh

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. — Jean Anouilh

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write. Inspiration? -- a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance. — Jean Anouilh

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

The object of art is to give life shape. — Jean Anouilh

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. — Jean Anouilh

The true masters of the art of living are already happy. — Jean Anouilh

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me — Jean Anouilh

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

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

Every man thinks god is on his side. — Jean Anouilh

Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless. — Jean Anouilh

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

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

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. — Jean Anouilh

Life Lessons by Jean Anouilh

1. Jean Anouilh taught us to embrace our own unique perspectives and to never be afraid to be ourselves. He also showed us the importance of standing up for our beliefs and never compromising our values. Lastly, he reminded us to always be open to the possibilities that life can bring and to never give up on our dreams.