Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Jean Anouilh, fully Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh

French Playwright, Screen Writer

"Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are."

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

"What you get free costs too much."

"Saintliness is also a temptation."

"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."

"Love is, above all, the gift of oneself."

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

"Things are beautiful if you love them."

"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."

"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."

"Real miracles are created by men when they use their God-given courage and intelligence."

"One cannot weep for the entire world. It is beyond human strength. One must choose."

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

"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 a shape. "