Anatole France
Anatole France
Anatole Francewas a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 April 1844
CountryFrance
We have drugs to make women speak, but none to keep them silent.
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 mania of thinking renders one unfit for every activity.
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.
The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.
Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it.
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.
A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them
Good angels are fallible ... they sin every day and fall from Heaven like flies.
Distrust even Mathematics; albeit so sublime and highly perfected, we have here a machine of such delicacy it can only work in vacuo, and one grain of sand in the wheels is enough to put everything out of gear. One shudders to think to what disaster such a grain of sand may bring a Mathematical brain. Remember Pascal.
The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature.
Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.
The first virtue of all really great men is that they are sincere. They eradicate hypocrisy from their hearts.