Explore Quotes by Anatole France

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Showing 64 to 84 of 125 quotes

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.

Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

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.

Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.

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

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

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

It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.

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.

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.

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.

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

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

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.

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

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

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

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