Anatole France Quotes

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

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

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.

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

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

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

The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

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.

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

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

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

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

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

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

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.

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

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

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

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

Our passions are ourselves.

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

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

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.

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.

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

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

It is not customary to love what one has.

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

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

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

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

Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.

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

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.

Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned

The future is hidden even from those who make it.

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

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

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