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
What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.
A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.
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.
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.
The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature.
The first virtue of all really great men is that they are sincere. They eradicate hypocrisy from their hearts.
That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.
For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.
All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.
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.
One thing above all gives charm to men's thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.
Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.