Anatole France
Custom alone regulates morals.Collection: Morality
Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.Collection: Confession
Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.Collection: Respect
The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.Collection: Philosophy
It is by acts, and not by ideas, that people ensure the bar down the street cannot have a patio.Collection: Ideas
All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.Collection: Men
The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.Collection: Writing
Chance is the pseudonym God uses when He'd rather not sign His own name.Collection: God
We have drugs to make women speak, but none to keep them silent.Collection: Women
A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.Collection: Life
We live between two dense clouds; the forgetting of what was and the uncertainty of what will be.Collection: Clouds
What we call happiness is what we do not know.Collection: Knows
Good angels are fallible ... they sin every day and fall from Heaven like flies.Collection: Fall
We reproach people for talking about themselves but it is the subject they treat best.Collection: Self
If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather be guilty of an immoral act than of a cruel one.Collection: Deeds
People who don't count won't count.Collection: Teacher
For the majority of people , though they do not know what to do with this life , long for another that shall have no end .Collection: Long
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.Collection: Depression
Our passions are ourselves.Collection: Passion
God, conquered, will become Satan; Satan, conquering, will become God. May the fates spare me this terrible lot; I love the Hell which formed my genius. I love the Earth where I have done some good, if it be possible to do any good in this fearful world where beings live but by rapine.Collection: Fate
A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.Collection: Writing
In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.Collection: Democracy
Unhappiness does make people look stupid.Collection: Stupid
You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.Collection: Writing
The power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.Collection: Men
The faculty of doubting is rare among men. A few choice spirits carry the germs of it in them, but these do not develop without training.Collection: Men
I am a physician. I keep a drug-shop of lies. I give relief, consolation. Can one console and relieve without lying? ... Only women and doctors know how necessary and how helpful lies are to men.Collection: Lying
When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.Collection: Lying
The dog is a religious animal. In his savage state he worships the moon and the lights that float upon the waters. These are his gods to whom he appeals at night with long-drawn howls.Collection: Dog
A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.Collection: Writing
People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.Collection: People
For every monarchy overthrown the sky becomes less brilliant, because it loses a star. A republic is ugliness set free.Collection: Stars
Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear.Collection: Understanding
Until you have loved an animal, part of your soul will have remained dormant.Collection: Animal
Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die.Collection: Blood
The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it.Collection: Military
The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.Collection: Stars
It is almost impossible 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 distinction between good and evil.Collection: Life
Men are not created to know, men are not created to understand ... and our illusions increase with our knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
Truth possesses within herself a penetrating force, unknown alike to error and falsehood. I say 'truth' and you understand my meaning. For the beautiful words truth and justice need not to be defined in order to be understood in their true sense.Collection: Beautiful
We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks. Looking upwards, he beheld ... the incorruptible firmament, wherein the stars hung like so many lamps.Collection: Stars
The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.Collection: Light
It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.Collection: Clothes
It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.Collection: Deception
Caress your phrase tenderly; it will end by smiling at you.Collection: Phrases
It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.Collection: Political
It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.Collection: Wise
I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.Collection: Essence
Sometimes one day in a difference place gives you more than ten years of a life at home.Collection: Home