Anatole France Quotes - Page 5

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

Unhappiness does make people look stupid.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

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

The faculty of doubting is rare among men. A few choice spirits carry the germs of it in them, but these do not develop without training.

I am a physician. I keep a drug-shop of lies. I give relief, consolation. Can one console and relieve without lying? ... Only women and doctors know how necessary and how helpful lies are to men.

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

When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.

It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.

A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.

People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.

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

For every monarchy overthrown the sky becomes less brilliant, because it loses a star. A republic is ugliness set free.

Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear.

Until you have loved an animal, part of your soul will have remained dormant.

Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it.

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

It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

Play is hand-to-hand encounter with Fate.

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

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

Truth possesses within herself a penetrating force, unknown alike to error and falsehood. I say 'truth' and you understand my meaning. For the beautiful words truth and justice need not to be defined in order to be understood in their true sense.

We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks. Looking upwards, he beheld ... the incorruptible firmament, wherein the stars hung like so many lamps.

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.