Quotes from Anatole France

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

The power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.

Men are not created to know, men are not created to understand ... and our illusions increase with our knowledge.

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

The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature.

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

I ought not to fear to survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there are always some whom one can love.

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

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.

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.

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

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 into another.

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

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

The impotence of God is infinite.

We thank God for having created this world, and praise Him for having made another, quite different one, where the wrongs of this one are corrected.

God forbids suicide, and is unwilling that his creatures should destroy themselves.

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

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.

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