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Quotes
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- The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards; and curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy.
- It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
- An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
- What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
- Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
- The pseudonym for God when He did not want to sign.
- The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
- The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
- 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.
- I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
- 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.
- Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.
- It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.
- Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
- There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.
- A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
- Chance is the pseudonym God uses when He does not want to sign His name.
- In art as in love, instinct is enough.
- The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
- The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.
- The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.
- Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.
- The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
- Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.
- History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
- We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.
- It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.
- 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.
- It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.
- Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.
- That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
- It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.
- When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
- I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.
- If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
- To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
- Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
- Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.
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Anatole France was 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 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements.
France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
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