Anatole France

All writers of confessions from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their sins.

Suffering _ how divine it is, how misunderstood! 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.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.

For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.

We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.

Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.

I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

We chase dreams and embrace shadows.

To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.(From an introductory speech at a session of the Académie Française, December 24, 1896)

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.

To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream, not only plan, but also believe!