Anatole France

I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.

It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

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.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.

We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.

Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.

Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.

Silence is the wit of fools.

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.