Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.
Anatole FranceRead
You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.
Interpretation
Improving your writing skills requires practice and refinement, much like any craft.
Anatole France's quote suggests that writing, like woodworking, is a skill that develops through careful attention to detail and revision. Just as a skilled joiner shapes wood through planning and sanding, a good writer polishes their sentences, removing excess and refining their words to achieve clarity and impact.
In practice
In a workshop on writing, this quote can inspire participants to embrace the editing process.
Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.
Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned
There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.
Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.
I believe that of all the things I have done, exciting though many of them have been, there's no doubt in my mind that the most worthwhile have been the establishing of schools and hospitals, and the rebuilding of monasteries in the mountains.
There is nothing obscure about the objectives of educational exchange. Its purpose is to acquaint Americans with the world as it is and to acquaint students and scholars from many lands with America as it is-not as we wish it were or as we might wish foreigners to see it, but exactly as it is-which by my reckoning is an "image" of which no American need be ashamed.
Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience.
The Greeks understood that mind and body must develop in harmonious proportions to produce a creative intelligence. And so did the most brilliant intelligence of our earliest days - Thomas Jefferson - when he said, not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise. If the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, was Secretary of State, and twice President, could give it two hours, our children can give it ten or fifteen minutes.
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