To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
– Anatole France
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
– Anatole France
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.
– Anatole France
Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
– Anatole France
Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.
– Anatole France
History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
– Anatole France
I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
– Anatole France
I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.
– Anatole France
If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
– Anatole France
If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
– Anatole France
Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.
– Anatole France
In art as in love, instinct is enough.
– Anatole France
Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.
– Anatole France
Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
– Anatole France
It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.
– Anatole France
It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
– Anatole France
It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.
– Anatole France
It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.
– Anatole France
It was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy. From that moment I began to grow old in my own esteem -and in my esteem age is not estimable.
– Anatole France
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
– Anatole France
Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.
– Anatole France
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.
– Anatole France
Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
– Anatole France
No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
– Anatole France
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
– Anatole France
Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.
– 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
Silence is the wit of fools.
– Anatole France
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.
– Anatole France
That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
– Anatole France
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
– Anatole France
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool.
– Anatole France
The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
– Anatole France
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
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
There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.
– Anatole France
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
– Anatole France
Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
– Anatole France
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.
– Anatole France
We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.
– Anatole France
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!
– Anatole France
When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
– Anatole France
Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.
– Anatole France
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.
– Anatole France
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.
– Anatole France
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
– Anatole France
The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
– Anatole France
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
– Anatole France
People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
– Anatole France
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.
– Anatole France
Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
– Anatole France
The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
– Anatole France
Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
– Anatole France
An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.
