Famous Quotes

Quotes by Anatole France

• 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.
• An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.
• Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
• History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
• I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
• In art as in love, instinct is enough.
• Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
• It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
• Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
• Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.
• Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
• 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.
• Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.
• Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
• 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.
• That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
• 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 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 truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
• The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
• To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream not only plan, but also believe.
• To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
• Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
• 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.
• We reproach people for talking about themselves but it is the subject they treat best.
• 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.