Quotes from Anatole France

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

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

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

Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom

Our passions are ourselves.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.

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

There are forces, Lucius, infinitely more powerful than reason and science." " What are they?" asked Cotta. "Ignorance and folly," replied Aristaeus.

As to the kind of truth one finds in books, it is a truth that enables us sometimes to discern what things are not, without ever enabling us to discover what they are.

All changes, even the most longed for, must have their melancholy

It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.

Dictionary: The universe in alphabetical order.

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.

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

It is not customary to love what one has

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity. ???? ???? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ?????

Il est dans la nature humaine de penser sagement et d'agir d'une façon absurde.

the adventure of the soul among the masterpieces.