Anatole France (1844-1924)

Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters. He was a member of the Académie Française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament".

Quotes

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 do know and what you don't.

Education
Never lend books - nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.
To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures.
If a million people say a foolish thing, is it still a foolish thing.
...it is not by reflection and intelligence, but by perception, that the highest and purest truths are attained.
The people who have no weakness are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
He who lives little, changes little.
Who ever enters here, honors me; who ever does not-- pleases me.
Be gentle and learn how to suffer. When one suffers patiently, one suffers less.
No one gives as much as he who gives hope.
. . .everyone took an interest in the conversation, for each one was interested in what he or she said.
Our pains are no excuse for slandering the world.
Ignorance is a necessary condition of human happiness, and it must be owned that in most cases we fulfill it well. We know almost nothing about ourselves; absolutely nothing about our neighbors. Ignorance constitutes our peace of mind; self- deception our felicity.
I have no objection on principle to make to the guillotine. Nature, my only mistress and my only instructress, certainly offers me no suggestion to the effect that a man's life is of any value; on the contrary, she teaches in all kinds of ways that it is of none. The sole end and object of living beings seems to be to serve as food for other beings destined to the same end. Murder is of natural right; therefore, the penalty of death is lawful, on condition it is exercised from no motives either of virtue or of justice, but by necessity or to gain some profit thereby. However, I must have perverse intincts, for I sicken to see blood flow, and this defect of character all my philosophy has failed so far to correct.
I love reason, but I am no fanatic in my love. Reason is our guide and beacon-light; but when you have made a divinity of it, it will blind you and instigate you to crime.
Innocence more often than not is a piece of good fortune rather than a virtue.
To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
So long as society is founded on injustice, the function of the laws will be to defend injustice. And the more unjust they are the more respectable they will seem.
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.

Laws