Anatole France Quotes

Il est sage de ne mettre ni crainte, ni espérance dans l’avenir incertain.

Savoir n'est rien, imaginer est tout.

"Take care, father," said Bulloch gently, "that what you call murder and robbery may not really be war and conquest, those sacred foundations of empires, those sources of all human virtues and all human greatness."

Ignorance is the necessary condition, i do not say of happiness, but of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence a single hour. The sentiments that make it sweet to us, or at any rate tolerable, spring from a falsehood, and are fed on illusions.
If, like God, a man possessed the truth, the sole and perfect truth, and once let it escape out of his hands, the world would be annihilated there and then, and the universe melt away instantly like a shadow.

She denied everything, not to convince him, for he had seen them, but from expediency and good taste, and to avoid painful explanations. Hippolyte Ceres suffered all the tortures of jealousy. He admitted it to himself, he kept saying inwardly, “I am a strong man; I am clad in armour; but the wound is underneath, it is in my heart,” and turning towards his wife, who looked beautiful in her guilt, he would say: “It ought not to have been with him.” He was right — Eveline ought not to have loved in government circles. He suffered so much that he took up his revolver, exclaiming: “I will go and kill him!” But he remembered that a Minister of Commerce cannot kill his own Prime Minister, and he put his revolver back into his drawer.

"Monsieur Bergeret, com o nariz num livro grosso, pronunciou lentamente estas palavras: "A liberdade não tinha em seu favor senão uma ínfima minoria de pessoas instruídas. Quase o clero inteiro, os generais, a plebe ignara e fanática queriam um senhor." — Que está dizendo? – perguntou o senhor Mazure, agitado. — Nada – respondeu monsieur Bergeret. — Leio um capítulo da história da Espanha. O quadro dos costumes públicos ao tempo da restauração de Fernando VII."

Може да се съмнявате във всичко, но условията на живота от това няма да се променят.

C'est dans l'absolue ignorance de notre raison d'être qu'est la racine de notre tristesse et de nos dégoûts.

We have medicines to make women speak; we have none to make them keep silence.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?

Zita told him of the black standards assembled in crowds in all the waste places of the globe; of the deliverance premeditated and prepared in the provinces of Heaven, where the first revolt had long ago been fomented. "Prince," she went on, "your army awaits you. Come, lead it on to victory.""Friends," replied the great archangel, "I was aware of the object of your visit. Baskets of fruit and honeycombs await you under the shade of this mighty tree. The sun is about to descend into the roseate waters of the Sacred River. When you have eaten, you will slumber pleasantly in this garden, where the joys of the intellect and of the senses have reigned since the day when I drove hence the spirit of the old Demiurge. To-morrow I will give you my answer."

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.

Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

ما ارزان‌تر از سخن کالایی نداریم و به بهای زندگی مردم هرقدر از آن صرف کنیم باز در معامله زیان نمی‌بریم.

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.