Quotes By Anatole France

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.

I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.

Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.

The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.

Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.

That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.

If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.