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
Make love now, by night and by day, in winter and in summer... You are in the world for that and the rest of life is nothing but vanity, illusion, waste. There is only one science, love, only one riches, love, only one policy, love. To make love is all the law, and the prophets.
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.
Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred.
Change is the essence of life.
The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
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 another.
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.
In art as in love, instinct is enough.
To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
It is almost 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 difference between right and wrong.