Quotes By Anatole France

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

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

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

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool.

It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.

It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

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

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.

The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

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

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

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

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

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.

Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.

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.

Silence is the wit of fools.

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.

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

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.