Anatole France Quotes

There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

But my foreknowledge must not encroach upon their free will. "In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of what I know, I will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced, and in my blind clearsightedness I will let myself be surprised by what I have foreseen.

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

Justice is the sanction of established injustice.

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

Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

Ah! Yes, the truth, that ingenious concoction of desirability of appearance.

I see only one solution," said St. Augustine. "The penguins will go to hell." "But they have no soul," observed St. Irenaeus. "It is a pity"" sighed Tertullian.

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

All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it.

I love reason, but my love does not make me a fanatic,' Brotteaux answered. 'Reason is our guide, a light to show us our way; but if you make a divinity of it, it will blind you and lead you into crime

I sought out the laws which govern nature, solid or ethereal, and after much pondering I perceived that the Universe had not been formed as its pretended Creator would have us believe; I knew that all that exists, exists of itself and not by the caprice of Iahveh; that the world is itself its own creator and the spirit its own God. Henceforth I despised Iahveh for his imposture, and I hated him because he showed himself to be opposed to all that I found desirable and good: liberty, curiosity, doubt.

It is good to collect things, it is better to take walks.

If you have not loved an animal, your soul remains unawakened.

I am but a miserable sinner, but I have found, in my long life, that the cenobite has no foe worse than sadness.

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

For all armies are the finest in the world. The second finest army, if one could exist, would be in a notoriously inferior position; it would be certain to be beaten. It ought to be disbanded at once. Therefore, all armies are the finest in the world.

The law ... allows rich as well as poor to sleep under bridges.

Dog! When we first met on the highway of life, we came from the two poles of creation ... What can be the meaning of the obscure love for me that has sprung up in your heart?

The best sentence? The shortest.

It is not customary to love what one has

And what, above all, I blame in you is that you have not married in compliance with the law and given children to the Republic, as every good citizen is bound to do.

They did not understand that war, which trained courage and founded the cities of barbarous and ignorant men, brings to victor himself but ruin and misery, and is nothing but a horrible and stupid crime when nations are united together by common bonds of art, science, and trade.

Man is summed up in Art. All the rest is moonshine.

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

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

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

I ought not to fear to survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there are always some whom one can love.

He left Penguinia impoverished and depopulated. The flower of the insula perished in his wars. At the time of his fall there were left in our country none but the hunchbacks and cripples from whom we are descended. But he gave us glory." "He made you pay dearly for it!" "Glory never costs too much," replied my guide.

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.

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

The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges of Paris.

To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.

There is only one science, love, one riches, love, only one policy, love. To make love is all the law and the prophets.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The sadness of churches at night moves me; I feel in them the grandeur of nothingness.

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.
ربما يكون الفضول هو اعظم فضائل البشر

All writers of confessions from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their sins.

People who don't count won't count.

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

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

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.

his life was gently gliding along like a stream that reflects the heaven and fertilizes the fields.

There, in a livid light, the demons tormented the souls of the damned. The souls preserved the appearance of the bodies which had held them, and even wore some rags of clothing. These souls seemed peaceful in the midst of their torments.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we yearn for another that will be eternal.

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.

The impotence of God is infinite.

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

Ugly women may be naturally quite as capricious as pretty ones; but as they are never petted and spoiled, and as no allowances are made for them, they soon find themselves obliged either to suppress their whims or to hide them.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

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.

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

A dictionary is merely the universe arranged in alphabetical order.

Silence is the wit of fools.

Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that is left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die. April 9, 1916 Sorbonne

Insane Europeans who plot to cut each others' throats, now that one and the same civilisation enfolds and unites them all!

We chase dreams and embrace shadows.

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

For you can always tell the gods by their appetite.

Alas!' replied Maître Mouche, 'she must be trained to take her part in the struggle of life. One does not come into this world simply to amuse oneself, and to do just what one pleases.'

'One comes into this world,' I responded, rather warmly, 'to enjoy what is beautiful and what is good, and to do as one pleases, when the things one wants to do are noble, intelligent, and generous. 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.

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.

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

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

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

To clothe the penguins is a very serious business. At present when a penguin desires a penguin he knows precisely what he desires and his lust is limited by an exact knowledge of its object. At this moment two or three couples of penguins are making love on the beach. See with what simplicity! No one pays any attention and the actors themselves do not seem to be greatly preoccupied. But when the female penguins are clothed, the male penguin will not form so exact a notion of what it is that attracts him to them. His indeterminate desires will fly out into all sorts of dreams and illusions; in short, father, he will know love and its mad torments. And all the time the female penguins will cast down their eyes and bite their lips, and take on airs as if they kept a treasure under their clothes! . . . what a pity!

Ignorance is the necessary condition, i do not say of happiness, but of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence a single hour. The sentiments that make it sweet to us, or at any rate tolerable, spring from a falsehood, and are fed on illusions.
If, like God, a man possessed the truth, the sole and perfect truth, and once let it escape out of his hands, the world would be annihilated there and then, and the universe melt away instantly like a shadow.

Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.

I have always preferred the folly of the passions to the wisdom of indifference. But just because my own passions are not of that sort which burst out with violence to devastate and kill, the common mind is not aware of their existence. Nevertheless, I am greatly moved by them at times, and it has more than once been my fate to lose my sleep for the sake of a few pages written by some forgotten monk or printed by some humble apprentice of Peter Schöffer. And if these fierce enthusiasms are slowly being quenched in me, it is only because I am being slowly quenched myself. Our passions are ourselves. My old books are Me. I am just as old and thumb-worn as they are.

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

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.

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

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

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

I awaited Signor Polizzi's reply with ill-contained impatience. I could not even remain quiet; I would make sudden nervous gestures - open books and violent close them again. One day I happened to upset a book with my elbow - a volume of Moréri. Hamilcar, who was washing himself, suddenly stopped, and looked angrily at me, with his paw over his ear. Was this the tumultuous existence he must expect under my roof? Had there not been a tacit understanding between us that we should live a peaceful life? I had broken the covenant.

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.

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

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

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

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

as regards ownership the right of the first occupier is uncertain and badly founded. The right of conquest, on the other hand, rests on more solid foundations. It is the only right that receives respect since it is the only one that makes itself respected.

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 do know and what you don't.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

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

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

Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom

Take care, father," said Bulloch gently, "that what you call murder and robbery may not really be war and conquest, those sacred foundations of empires, those sources of all human virtues and all human greatness.

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.

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

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

The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.