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
It is almost impossible 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 distinction between good and evil.
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.
That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.
There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.
Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.
An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
Silence is the wit of fools.
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.
We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.