Anatole France

Who was Anatole France?

Anatole France was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful 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 Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his literary achievements.

France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel's literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Famous Quotes:

• The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
• The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards; and curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy.
• Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.
• 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.
• The pseudonym for God when He did not want to sign.
• What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
• It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
• Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.
• Chance is the pseudonym God uses when He does not want to sign His name.
• 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.