Quotes By Anatole France

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

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

Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.

Silence is the wit of fools.

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

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

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

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.

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

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.

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.

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.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

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

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.