Anatole France

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

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

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

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 know and what you don't.

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.

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.

The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.

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

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!

The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

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.

Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.