Anatole France Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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

Anatole France
A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.

Anatole France
Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other who cries, makes it sacred.

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

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

Anatole France
Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

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

Anatole France
Curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy. Those acquirements crammed by force into the minds of children simply clog and stifle intelligence. In order that knowledge be properly digested, it must have been swallowed with a good appetite.

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

Anatole France
We reproach people for talking about themselves but it is the subject they treat best.

Anatole France
Penguinia gloried in its wealth. Those who produced the things necessary for life, wanted them; those who did not produce them had more than enough. "But these," as a member of the Institute said, "are necessary economic fatalities." The great Penguin people had no longer either traditions, intellectual culture, or arts. The progress of civilisation manifested itself among them by murderous industry, infamous speculation, and hideous luxury. Its capital assumed, as did all the great cities of the time, a cosmopolitan and financial character. An immense and regular ugliness reigned within it. The country enjoyed perfect tranquillity. It had reached its zenith.

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

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

Anatole France
If thirty-six million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Sometimes misquoted as: If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

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

Anatole France
They [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.

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

Anatole France
Imitation lies at the root of most human actions. A respectable person is one who conforms to custom. People are called good when they do as others do.

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

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

Anatole France
Mutterings and murmurs, mingling with the rumours of glory, gave rise to fears of an indecisive battle, a precipitate retreat. Insolent voices gave out that a spirit of the lowest category, a guardian angel, the insignificant Arcade, had checked and routed the dazzling host of the three great archangels.

Anatole France
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.

Anatole France
Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants.

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

Anatole France
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

Anatole France
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.

Anatole France