Anatole France Quotes
Most popular Anatole France Quotes
Our passions are ourselves.
In art as in love, instinct is enough.
The future is a convenient place for dreams.
It is by acts and not by ideas that men live.
The domestic hearth. There only is real happiness.
To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
Time preserves nothing that you make without its help.
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.
Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.
Innocence, most often, is a good fortune and not a virtue.
It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
No matter how much we seek, we never find anything but ourselves.
A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings — admiration or pity.
Life teaches us that we are never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
People with no faults are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
Let our teaching be full of ideas. Hitherto it has been stuffed only with facts.
Simple style is like white light. It is complex but its complexity is not obvious.
The finest words in the world are only vain sounds, if you can not comprehend them.
People who have no faults are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
One must learn to think well before learning to think; afterward it proves too difficult.
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Men are made that they can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
He prided himself on being a man without prejudice, and this itself is a very great prejudice.
That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
I like truth; I think mankind needs it. But without lies humanity would be die of boredom and futility.
What is traveling? Changing your place? By no means! Traveling is changing your opinions and your prejudices.
Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other who cries, makes it sacred.
Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.
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 law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their 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.
An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind. It is a teacher's duty to teach the pupil how to will.
The heart errs like the head; its errors are not any the less fatal, and we have more trouble getting free of them because of their sweetness.
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.
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.
Universal peace will be realized, not because mankind will become better, but because a new order of things, a new science, new economic necessities, will impose peace.
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 into another!
Criticism is, like philosophy and history, a sort of romance designed for those who have sagacious and curious minds, and every romance is, rightly taken, an autobiography.
Suffering—how divine it is, how misunderstood! 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.
An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.
The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul in the midst of masterpieces.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.
