Anatole France Quotes and Quotation

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

• All the historical books which contain no lies are extremely tedious.
  • Variant: History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

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

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

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

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

Attributed

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.

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

• If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

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

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

• In art as in love, instinct is enough.

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

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

• It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

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

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

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

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

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

• 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.

• Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

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

• 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.

• Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

• No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, none ever will.

• Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

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

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

• Silence is the wit of fools.

• 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.

• That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.

• The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
  • Variant: The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
  • Variant: We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

• The books that everybody admires are those nobody reads.

• The finest words in the world are only vain sounds, if you cannot comprehend them.

• The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool.

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

• The impotence of God is infinite.

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

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

• To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.
  • Variant: To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.

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

• 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!

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

• You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.

• 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.

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