A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
Anatole France

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.
Anatole France

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.
Anatole France

An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.
Anatole France

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

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.
Anatole France

Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.
Anatole France

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
Anatole France

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

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


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

If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
Anatole France

Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.
Anatole France

In art as in love, instinct is enough.
Anatole France

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

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

It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.
Anatole France

It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
Anatole France

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

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