Anatole France, nee Jacques Anatole Thibault, was the son of a Paris book dealer. He grew up to become a highly esteemed man of letters. A poet, novelist, newspaperman, and a story-teller, France won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. He also said some neat stuff. To wit:
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.
It is only by amusing oneself that one can learn.
An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.
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.
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
If 50 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.
The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.
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