Anatole France born François-Anatole Thibault, 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”. These Anatole France quotes will motivate you.
Best Anatole France Quotes
- “To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” ~ Anatole France
- “Until one has loved an animal a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” ~ Anatole France
- “Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.” ~ Anatole France
- “Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.” ~ Anatole France
- “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
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“If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.” ~ Anatole France
- “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” ~ Anatole France
- “If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” ~ Anatole France
- “It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.” ~ Anatole France
- “Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.” ~ Anatole France
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“The more you say, the less they remember.” ~ Anatole France
- “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.” ~ Anatole France
- “We have never heard the devil’s side of the story, God wrote all the book.” ~ Anatole France
- “A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reform. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.” ~ Anatole France
- “Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.” ~ Anatole France
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“In art as in love, instinct is enough.” ~ Anatole France
- “Of all earthly creatures, humans alone have the power to choose. One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past nor in complaining about the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the very essence of life.” ~ Anatole France
- “Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.” ~ Anatole France
- “It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.” ~ Anatole France
- “When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.” ~ Anatole France
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“Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.” ~ Anatole France
- “Only men who are not interested in women are interested in women’s clothes. Men who like women never notice what they wear.” ~ Anatole France
- “Nine tenths of education is encouragement.” ~ Anatole France
- “Sometimes one day in a difference place gives you more than ten years of a life at home.” ~ Anatole France
- “Intelligent women always marry fools” ~ Anatole France
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“I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.” ~ Anatole France
- “The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.” ~ Anatole France
- “The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.” ~ Anatole France
- “A woman without breasts is like a bed without pillows.” ~ Anatole France
- “The first virtue of all really great men is that they are sincere. They eradicate hypocrisy from their hearts.” ~ Anatole France
- “I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.” ~ Anatole France
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“What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.” ~ Anatole France
- “The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.” ~ Anatole France
- “It is well for the heart to be naive and for the mind not to be.” ~ Anatole France 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 know and what you don’t.” ~ Anatole France
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“To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.” ~ Anatole France
- “Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.” ~ Anatole France
- “The Future is hidden even from those who are forging it.” ~ Anatole France
- “To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.” ~ Anatole France
- “A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.” ~ Anatole France
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“The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.” ~ Anatole France
- “It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.” ~ Anatole France
- “The future is a convenient place for dreams.” ~ Anatole France
- “Caress your phrase tenderly; it will end by smiling at you.” ~ Anatole France
- “It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.” ~ Anatole France
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“The impotence of God is infinite.” ~ Anatole France
- “America, where thanks to Congress, there are forty million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments.” ~ Anatole France
- “Chance is the pseudonym God uses when He’d rather not sign His own name.” ~ Anatole France
- “Good angels are fallible … they sin every day and fall from Heaven like flies.” ~ Anatole France
- “It is by believing in roses that you make them bloom.” ~ Anatole France
- “Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned” ~ Anatole France
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“The best sentence? The shortest.” ~ Anatole France
- “True education is the ability to discern the difference between what you do know and what you don’t.” ~ Anatole France
- “Our passions are ourselves.” ~ Anatole France
- “An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.” ~ Anatole France
- “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.” ~ Anatole France
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“Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.” ~ Anatole France
- “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
- “The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.” ~ Anatole France
- “What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.” ~ Anatole France
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“It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.” ~ Anatole France
- “The faculty of doubting is rare among men. A few choice spirits carry the germs of it in them, but these do not develop without training.” ~ Anatole France
- “A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.” ~ Anatole France
- “Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.” ~ Anatole France
- “He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices, and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.” ~ Anatole France
