Anatole france quotes

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!

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

Chance is the pseudonym God uses when He'd rather not sign His own name.

Our passions are ourselves.

A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.

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

We thank God for having created this world, and praise Him for having made another, quite different one, where the wrongs of this one are corrected.

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

Men are not created to know, men are not created to understand ... and our illusions increase with our knowledge.

Caress your phrase tenderly; it will end by smiling at you.

Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.

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.

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

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

Intelligent women always marry fools

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.

The Future is hidden even from those who are forging it.

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

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

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 greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

The faculty of doubting is rare among men. A few choice spirits carry the germs of it in them, but these do not develop without training.

If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather be guilty of an immoral act than of a cruel one.

Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned

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

People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.

A woman without breasts is like a bed without pillows.

An old philosopher said to Monsieur Coignard, a Reverend Father: 'You are a pig!' To which Abad Coignard answered: 'You flatter me, sir. But unfortunately, I'm only a man.'

It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.

Until you have loved an animal, part of your soul will have remained dormant.

When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.

Of all earthly creatures, humans alone have the power to choose. One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past nor in complaining about the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the very essence of life.

The impotence of God is infinite.

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

In order that knowledge be properly digested it must have been swallowed with a good appetite.

We chase dreams and embrace shadows.

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.

It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.

Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear.

A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.

We have drugs to make women speak, but none to keep them silent.

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.

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

The power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.

Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.

For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.

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.

So long as society is founded on injustice, the function of the laws will be to defend injustice. And the more unjust they are the more respectable they will seem.

Yet, every now and then, there would pass a young girl, slender, fair and desirable, arousing in young men a not ignoble desire to possess her, and stirring in old men regrets for ecstasy not seized and now forever past.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.

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

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

Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.

In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.

Change is the essence of life.

We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks. Looking upwards, he beheld ... the incorruptible firmament, wherein the stars hung like so many lamps.

God, conquered, will become Satan; Satan, conquering, will become God. May the fates spare me this terrible lot; I love the Hell which formed my genius. I love the Earth where I have done some good, if it be possible to do any good in this fearful world where beings live but by rapine.

Truth possesses within herself a penetrating force, unknown alike to error and falsehood. I say 'truth' and you understand my meaning. For the beautiful words truth and justice need not to be defined in order to be understood in their true sense.

The best sentence? The shortest.

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

I am a physician. I keep a drug-shop of lies. I give relief, consolation. Can one console and relieve without lying? ... Only women and doctors know how necessary and how helpful lies are to men.

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.

Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.

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

Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City.....Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

Silence is the wit of fools.

It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.

People who don't count won't count.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.

Sometimes one day in a difference place gives you more than ten years of a life at home.

It is not customary to love what one has.

We live between two dense clouds; the forgetting of what was and the uncertainty of what will be.

Unhappiness does make people look stupid.

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

For the majority of people , though they do not know what to do with this life , long for another that shall have no end .

Word-carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry: you must join your sentences smoothly.

For every monarchy overthrown the sky becomes less brilliant, because it loses a star. A republic is ugliness set free.

We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.

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

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

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

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

It is by believing in roses that you make them bloom.

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

The first virtue of all really great men is that they are sincere. They eradicate hypocrisy from their hearts.

America, where thanks to Congress, there are forty million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments.

Good angels are fallible ... they sin every day and fall from Heaven like flies.

True education is the ability to discern the difference between what you do know and what you don't.

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.

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

The future is a convenient place for dreams.

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

It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.

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.

Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die.

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

The more you say, the less they remember.

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.

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

The dog is a religious animal. In his savage state he worships the moon and the lights that float upon the waters. These are his gods to whom he appeals at night with long-drawn howls.

What we call happiness is what we do not know.

God forbids suicide, and is unwilling that his creatures should destroy themselves.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it.

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

Chance is perhaps 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.

A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.