To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
Anatole France
Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
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.
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
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.
It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.
It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.
Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.
In art as in love, instinct is enough.
Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women's clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.
I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.
An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.
I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool.
That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.
The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.
Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.
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.
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 books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.
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.
Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.
Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.
Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.
