Anatole France Quotes - Page 7

What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.

Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

The mania of thinking renders one unfit for every activity.

There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.

Universal peace will be realized, not because man will become better, but because a new order of things, a new science, new economic necessities, will impose peace.

Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred.

The law ... allows rich as well as poor to sleep under bridges.

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

It's not by amusing oneself that one learns.

Justice is the sanction of established injustice.

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.

That child whose mother has never smiled upon him is worthy neither of the table of the gods nor the couch of the goddesses.

Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.

I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.

Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.

It is by acts, and not by ideas, that people ensure the bar down the street cannot have a patio.

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.

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