Anatole France

The future is a convenient place for dreams.

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

Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

We have drugs to make women speak, but none to keep them silent.

In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.

The first virtue of all really great men is that they are sincere. They eradicate hypocrisy from their hearts.

The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.

We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.

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.

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.

One thing above all gives charm to men's thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.

An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.

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.

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

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

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

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!