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
All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.
Our passions are ourselves.
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.
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.
We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.
Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.
One thing above all gives charm to men's thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.
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.
The future is hidden even from those who make it.
I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.
I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
It is by believing in roses that you make them bloom.
For the majority of people , though they do not know what to do with this life , long for another that shall have no end .
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.