Quotes By Anatole France

Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.

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

Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

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.

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

Silence is the wit of fools.

Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.

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.

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.

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.

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

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

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.

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

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.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

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

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

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.

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

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.

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

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

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.

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