Anatole France Quotes
It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.
The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.
Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.
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.
An old philosopher said to Monsieur Coignard, a Reverend Father: 'You are a pig!' To which Abad Coignard answered: 'You flatter me, sir. But unfortunately, I'm only a man.'
There is only one science, love, one riches, love, only one policy, love. To make love is all the law and the prophets.
What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.
Dog! When we first met on the highway of life, we came from the two poles of creation.... What can be the meaning of the obscure love for me that has sprung up in your heart?
Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred.
So long as society is founded on injustice, the function of the laws will be to defend injustice. And the more unjust they are the more respectable they will seem.
The power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.
In order that knowledge be properly digested it must have been swallowed with a good appetite.
We live between two dense clouds; the forgetting of what was and the uncertainty of what will be.
Men are not created to know, men are not created to understand ... and our illusions increase with our knowledge.
The heart errs like the head; its errors are not any the less fatal, and we have more trouble getting free of them because of their sweetness.
