Top 100 Anatole France Quotes
#1. 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.
Anatole France
#3. To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.
Anatole France
#4. It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
Anatole France
#5. The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature.
Anatole France
#6. Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.
Anatole France
#9. Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.
Anatole France
#10. History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
Anatole France
#11. In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
Anatole France
#12. What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.
Anatole France
#13. Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants.
Anatole France
#14. Determination. To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream. Not only plan, but also believe.
Anatole France
#15. Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.
Anatole France
#16. When it does not yield to the rudder," said he to them, "the ship yields to the rock.
Anatole France
#17. He prided himself on being a man without prejudice, and this itself is a very great prejudice.
Anatole France
#18. I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.
Anatole France
#19. 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.
Anatole France
#20. If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
Anatole France
#22. The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.
Anatole France
#23. That child whose mother has never smiled upon him is worthy neither of the table of the gods nor the couch of the goddesses.
Anatole France
#24. A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.
Anatole France
#25. We thank God for having created this world, and praise Him for having made another, quite different one, where the wrongs of this one are corrected.
Anatole France
#26. We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we yearn for another that will be eternal.
Anatole France
#28. A dictionary is merely the universe arranged in alphabetical order.
Anatole France
#29. And what, above all, I blame in you is that you have not married in compliance with the law and given children to the Republic, as every good citizen is bound to do.
Anatole France
#30. There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
Anatole France
#33. It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Anatole France
#34. Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.
Anatole France
#35. The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
Anatole France
#36. Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.
Anatole France
#37. If you have not loved an animal, your soul remains unawakened.
Anatole France
#38. Suffering - how divine it is, how misunderstood! 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.
Anatole France
#39. If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather be guilty of an immoral act than of a cruel one.
Anatole France
#40. A woman without breasts is like a bed without pillows.
Anatole France
#41. 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.
Anatole France
#42. I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.
Anatole France
#43. What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?
Anatole France
#44. The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it.
Anatole France
#45. God forbids suicide, and is unwilling that his creatures should destroy themselves.
Anatole France
#46. A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.
Anatole France
#47. Ah! Yes, the truth, that ingenious concoction of desirability of appearance.
Anatole France
#48. Each one dreams the dream of life in his own way. I have dreamed it in my library; and when the hour shall come in which I must leave this world, may it please God to take me from my ladder - from before my shelves of books! ...
Anatole France
#49. In truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts.
Anatole France
#50. Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.
Anatole France
#51. The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
Anatole France
#52. Universal peace will be realized, not because man will become better, but because a new order of things, a new science, new economic necessities, will impose peace.
Anatole France
#53. A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.
Anatole France
#54. The history books which contain no lies are extremely tedious
Anatole France
#55. All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.
Anatole France
#57. To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
Anatole France
#58. Have we not seen many times indeed human beings who, poor and naked, prostrate themselves before all the phantoms of fear, and rather than follow the teaching of well-disposed demons, obey the commandments of cruel demiurges?
Anatole France
#59. The law ... allows rich as well as poor to sleep under bridges.
Anatole France
#60. There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.
Anatole France
#61. 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.
Anatole France
#62. 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.
Anatole France
#63. Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.
Anatole France
#64. Yet, every now and then, there would pass a young girl, slender, fair and desirable, arousing in young men a not ignoble desire to possess her, and stirring in old men regrets for ecstasy not seized and now forever past.
Anatole France
#65. Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.
Anatole France
#66. Word-carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry: you must join your sentences smoothly.
Anatole France
#67. Men are not created to know, men are not created to understand ... and our illusions increase with our knowledge.
Anatole France
#68. I am but a miserable sinner, but I have found, in my long life, that the cenobite has no foe worse than sadness.
Anatole France
#69. We love truly only those we love even in their weakness and their poverty. To forbear, to forgive, to console, that alone is the science of love.
Anatole France
#70. For all armies are the finest in the world. The second finest army, if one could exist, would be in a notoriously inferior position; it would be certain to be beaten. It ought to be disbanded at once. Therefore, all armies are the finest in the world.
Anatole France
#71. This book bore the label R>3214 VIII/2. And this painful truth was suddenly borne in upon the mind of Monsieur Sariette: to wit, that the most scientific system of numbering will not help to find a book if the book is no longer in its place.
Anatole France
#72. America, where thanks to Congress, there are forty million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments.
Anatole France
#73. Dog! When we first met on the highway of life, we came from the two poles of creation ... What can be the meaning of the obscure love for me that has sprung up in your heart?
Anatole France
#74. Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.
Anatole France
#75. Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that is left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die. April 9, 1916 Sorbonne
Anatole France
#76. Sometimes one day in a difference place gives you more than ten years of a life at home.
Anatole France
#77. There is only one science, love, one riches, love, only one policy, love. To make love is all the law and the prophets.
Anatole France
#78. For the majority of people, though they do not know what to do with this life, long for another that shall have no end.
Anatole France
#79. Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
Anatole France
#80. Great courage was required to engage in such an adventure. But George was in love and Freeheart was faithful. And as the most delightful of poets says
What cannot Friendship guided by sweet Love?
Anatole France
#81. When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.
Anatole France
#82. Within every one of us there lives both a Don Quixote and a
Sancho Panza to whom we hearken by turns; and though Sancho
most persuades us, it is Don Quixote that we find ourselves obliged
to admire ...
Anatole France
#83. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.
Anatole France
#84. A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.
Anatole France
#85. Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred.
Anatole France
#86. Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.
Anatole France
#87. The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.
Anatole France
#89. The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Anatole France
#90. If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
Anatole France
#91. Caress your phrase tenderly; it will end by smiling at you.
Anatole France
#92. He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and his pretension itself is a very great prejudice.
Anatole France
#93. In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
Anatole France
#94. We have drugs to make women speak, but none to keep them silent.
Anatole France
#95. 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.
Anatole France
#96. Ugly women may be naturally quite as capricious as pretty ones; but as they are never petted and spoiled, and as no allowances are made for them, they soon find themselves obliged either to suppress their whims or to hide them.
Anatole France
#97. An old philosopher said to Monsieur Coignard, a Reverend Father: 'You are a pig!' To which Abad Coignard answered: 'You flatter me, sir. But unfortunately, I'm only a man.'
Anatole France
#100. I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.
Anatole France
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