Top 100 Anatole Quotes
#1. A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.
Simone Weil
#2. Remember what Anatole France said about the dog masturbating on your leg
'Sure, it's honest, but who needs it?
Richard Yates
#3. And Anatole, with the partiality dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their own reasoning, repeated the argument he had already put to Dolokhov a hundred times.
Leo Tolstoy
#4. Anatole and I had barely kissed. Most couples in the history of the world had barely kissed. It's when the world changed and people started doing everything else, that's when everybody got divorced.
Ann Brashares
#5. That's the way Chris lives, warning everyone who gets close of the lightning that may strike. Never touch anything, never make a mark. But Anatole can't live that way. The world's too lonely a place: he has to touch things, he has to put his arms around them.
Paul Russell
#6. Sometimes Anatole wonders just where the elusive point is, where you stop being sane.
Paul Russell
#7. For knowledge to be digested, it must be absorbed with relish," wrote Anatole France.
Anonymous
#8. It was only at her prayers that she felt able to think calmly and clearly either of Prince Andrey or Anatole, with a sense that her feelings for them were as nothing compared with her feel of worship and awe of God.
Leo Tolstoy
#9. There's a guy, Anatole Broyard, of the N. Y. Times Book Review, who's still chasing Kerouac's corpse with a stiletto.
Allen Ginsberg
#10. You get exactly what you want, Anatole's always suspected, only when you get it it's no longer what you want, you need something else.
Paul Russell
#11. 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
#13. I'm filled with desire - to live, to write, to do everything. Desire itself is a kind of immortality.
Anatole Broyard
#14. To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.
Anatole France
#15. Travel is like adultery; one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live ... in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.
Anatole Broyard
#16. It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.
Anatole France
#17. The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature.
Anatole France
#18. Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.
Anatole France
#19. It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.
Anatole France
#21. The majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike from pissing in the streets, sleeping under bridges, and stealing bread.
Anatole France
#23. Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.
Anatole France
#24. It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
Anatole Broyard
#26. History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
Anatole France
#27. We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.
Anatole France
#28. That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
Anatole France
#29. It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.
Anatole France
#30. In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
Anatole France
#31. What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.
Anatole France
#32. Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants.
Anatole France
#34. Determination. To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream. Not only plan, but also believe.
Anatole France
#35. A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
Anatole Broyard
#36. Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.
Anatole France
#37. If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.
Anatole Broyard
#38. There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.
Anatole France
#39. When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached.
Anatole Broyard
#40. When it does not yield to the rudder," said he to them, "the ship yields to the rock.
Anatole France
#41. To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.
Anatole France
#42. There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
Anatole Broyard
#43. He prided himself on being a man without prejudice, and this itself is a very great prejudice.
Anatole France
#45. I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.
Anatole France
#46. 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
#47. Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.
Anatole France
#50. If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
Anatole France
#51. When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
Anatole France
#53. The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.
Anatole France
#54. 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
#55. What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
Anatole France
#56. A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.
Anatole France
#58. 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
#59. The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.
Anatole France
#60. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)
Anatole Broyard
#61. Sometimes it seems that we might have been happier if we had once had an aristocracy to blame everything on.
Anatole Broyard
#62. The epic implications of being human end in more than this: We start our lives as if they were momentous stories, with a beginning, a middle and an appropriate end, only to find that they are mostly middles.
Anatole Broyard
#63. Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Anatole France
#64. We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we yearn for another that will be eternal.
Anatole France
#65. If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Anatole France
#66. Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
Anatole France
#68. A dictionary is merely the universe arranged in alphabetical order.
Anatole France
#69. 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
#70. The power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.
Anatole France
#71. There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.
Anatole France
#72. Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City ... Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.
Anatole France
#75. It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.
Anatole France
#76. as regards ownership the right of the first occupier is uncertain and badly founded. The right of conquest, on the other hand, rests on more solid foundations. It is the only right that receives respect since it is the only one that makes itself respected.
Anatole France
#77. Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.
Anatole France
#78. The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.
Anatole France
#79. There was a time when we expected nothing of our children but obedience, as opposed to the present, when we expect everything of them but obedience.
Anatole Broyard
#80. Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.
Anatole France
#81. Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.
Anatole France
#82. If you have not loved an animal, your soul remains unawakened.
Anatole France
#83. 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
#84. If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather be guilty of an immoral act than of a cruel one.
Anatole France
#85. It is not easy to be a pretty woman without causing mischief.
Anatole France
#86. Nagging questions remain: Where is the line between making the most of one's potential and reaching for the unattainable? Where is the line between education as a tool and education as a kind of magic? The line is blurred and that is why when education fails, disillusionment is so bitter.
Henry Anatole Grunwald
#87. Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.
Anatole France
#88. A woman without breasts is like a bed without pillows.
Anatole France
#89. 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
#90. I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock.
Anatole Broyard
#91. It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.
Anatole France
#92. I ought not to fear to survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there are always some whom one can love.
Anatole France
#93. I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.
Anatole France
#94. What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance?
Anatole France
#95. People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
Anatole Broyard
#96. The Kingdom of Heaven is a military autocracy and there is no public opinion in it.
Anatole France
#97. God forbids suicide, and is unwilling that his creatures should destroy themselves.
Anatole France
#98. I see only one solution," said St. Augustine. "The penguins will go to hell." "But they have no soul," observed St. Irenaeus. "It is a pity"" sighed Tertullian.
Anatole France
#99. A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.
Anatole France
#100. Ah! Yes, the truth, that ingenious concoction of desirability of appearance.
Anatole France
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