Anatole Quotes & Sayings

To choose a writer for a friend is like palling around with your cardiologist, who might be musing as you talk to him that you are a sinking man. A writer's love for another writer is never quite free of malice. He may enjoy discussing your failures even more than you do. He probably sees you as tragic, like his characters - or unworthy of tragedy, which is worse. — Anatole Broyard

A dictionary is merely the universe arranged in alphabetical order. — Anatole France

It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks. — Anatole France

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness. — Anatole France

You see, Dimitri and I, we are both suffering from ennui! We have still the match-boxes. But at last one gets tired even of match-boxes. Besides, our collection will soon be complete. And then what are we going to do?
'Oh, Madame!' I exclaimed, touched by the moral unhappiness of this pretty person, 'if you only had a son, then you would know what to do. You would then learn the purpose of your life, and your thoughts would become at once more serious and yet more cheerful.'
'But I have a son,' she replied. 'He is a big boy; he is eleven years old, and he suffers from ennui like the rest of us. Yes, my George has ennui, too; he is tired of everything. It is very wretched. — Anatole France

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom. — Anatole France

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

People who don't count won't count. — Anatole France

The law ... allows rich as well as poor to sleep under bridges. — Anatole France

And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of all collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. experts will bear me out when I say that it is the oldest thing in the world. Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, "And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?" "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china every day? — Walter Benjamin

Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it. — Anatole France

If you have not loved an animal, your soul remains unawakened. — Anatole France

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

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones. — Anatole France

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

America, where thanks to Congress, there are forty million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments. — Anatole France

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

Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred. — Anatole France

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

He left Penguinia impoverished and depopulated. The flower of the insula perished in his wars. At the time of his fall there were left in our country none but the hunchbacks and cripples from whom we are descended. But he gave us glory." "He made you pay dearly for it!" "Glory never costs too much," replied my guide. — Anatole France

We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best. — Anatole France

It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot. — Anatole France

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

Word-carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry: you must join your sentences smoothly. — Anatole France

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. — Anatole France

To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act. — Anatole France

It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit. — Anatole France

Change is the essence of life. — Anatole France

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

I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue. — Anatole France

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails ... and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.
- Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain — Anatole Broyard

The most dangerous part of lending books lies in the returning. At such times, friendships hang by a thread. I look for agony, ecstasy, for tears, transfiguration, trembling hands, a broken voice - but what the borrower usually says is, "I enjoyed it."
I enjoyed it - as if that were what books were for. — Anatole Broyard

Ninety percent of education is encouragement. — Anatole France

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

Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear. — Anatole France

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal. — Anatole France

Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth. — Anatole Broyard

The mania of thinking renders one unfit for every activity. — Anatole France

If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather be guilty of an immoral act than of a cruel one. — 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

Men are not created to know, men are not created to understand ... and our illusions increase with our knowledge. — Anatole France

The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature. — Anatole France

No," answered the Lord. "The remedy would be worse than the disease. It would be the ruin of the priesthood if essence prevailed over form in the laws of salvation." "Alas! Lord," sighed the humble Probus. "Be persuaded by my humble experience; as long as you reduce your sacraments to formulas your justice will meet with terrible obstacles. — Anatole France

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city. — Anatole Broyard

Play is hand-to-hand encounter with Fate. — Anatole France

A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so. — Anatole France

The first divorce in the world may have been a tragedy, but the hundred-millionth is not necessarily one. — Anatole Broyard

The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self. — Anatole Broyard

Until you have loved an animal, part of your soul will have remained dormant. — Anatole France

To clothe the penguins is a very serious business. At present when a penguin desires a penguin he knows precisely what he desires and his lust is limited by an exact knowledge of its object. At this moment two or three couples of penguins are making love on the beach. See with what simplicity! No one pays any attention and the actors themselves do not seem to be greatly preoccupied. But when the female penguins are clothed, the male penguin will not form so exact a notion of what it is that attracts him to them. His indeterminate desires will fly out into all sorts of dreams and illusions; in short, father, he will know love and its mad torments. And all the time the female penguins will cast down their eyes and bite their lips, and take on airs as if they kept a treasure under their clothes! . . . what a pity! — Anatole France

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. — Anatole France

When we were in bed, the only part of me she touched was my penis, because it was the most detached. — Anatole Broyard

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation. — Anatole France

I must beg very serious persons not to read this. It is not written for them. It is not written for grave people who despise trifles and who always require to be instructed. I only venture to offer this to those who like to be entertained, and whose minds are both young and gay. Only those who are amused by innocent pleasures will read this to the end. — Anatole France

The first virtue of all really great men is that they are sincere. They eradicate hypocrisy from their hearts. — Anatole France

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms, fogs, zephyrs.
I read about a family whose apartment consists of a series of spaces so strictly planned that they are obliged to give away their books as soon as they've read them. I think they have misunderstood the way books work.
Reading a book is only the first step in the relationship. After you've finished it, the book enters on its real career. It stand there as a badge, a blackmailer, a monument, a scar. It's both a flaw in the room, like a crack in the plaster, and a decoration. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
- in "About books; recoiling, rereading, retelling", The New York Times, February 22, 1987 — Anatole Broyard

For knowledge to be digested, it must be absorbed with relish," wrote Anatole France. — Anonymous

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

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

Sometimes one day in a difference place gives you more than ten years of a life at home. — Anatole France

If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living. — Anatole France

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

Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world. — Anatole France

Ignorance is the necessary condition, i do not say of happiness, but of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence a single hour. The sentiments that make it sweet to us, or at any rate tolerable, spring from a falsehood, and are fed on illusions.
If, like God, a man possessed the truth, the sole and perfect truth, and once let it escape out of his hands, the world would be annihilated there and then, and the universe melt away instantly like a shadow. — Anatole France

When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance. — Anatole Broyard

In truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts. — Anatole France

The impotence of God is infinite. — Anatole France

Silence is the wit of fools. — Anatole France

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

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

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

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

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

Anatole France frankly advised, "When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it." Yes, indeed, but do more. Copy many well-said things. Pierce them together. Assimilate them. Make the process of reading them a way to form the mind and shape the soul. As anthologies can never be complete, we will never exhaust the ways quotations can enrich our lives. — Gary Saul Morson

Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other. — Anatole Broyard

Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe. — Henry Anatole Grunwald

In order that knowledge be properly digested it must have been swallowed with a good appetite. — Anatole France

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

The thought of people reading in the sun, on a beach, tempts me to recommend dark books, written in the shadow of loneliness, despair, and death. Let these revelers feel a chill as they loll on their towels. — Anatole Broyard

As always happens when women lead lonely lives for any length of time without male society, on Anatole's appearance all the three women of Prince Bolkonsky's household felt that their life had not been real till then. Their powers of reasoning, feeling, and observing, immediately increased tenfold, and their life, which seemed to have been passed in darkness, was suddenly lit up by a new brightness full of significance. — Leo Tolstoy

As to the kind of truth one finds in books, it is a truth that enables us sometimes to discern what things are not, without ever enabling us to discover what they are. — Anatole France

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

Libel actions, when we look at them in perspective, are an ornament of a civilized society. They have replaced, after all, at least in most cases, a resort to weapons in defense of a reputation. — Henry Anatole Grunwald

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

But canst thou only die, withered embryo, foetus steeped in gall and scalding tears? Miserable abortion, dost thou think thou canst taste death, thou who hast never known life? If only God exists, that he may damn me. I hope for it. I wish it. God, I hate Thee! dost Thou hear? Overwhelm me with Thy damnation. To compel Thee to, I spit in Thy face. I must find an eternal hell, to exhaust the eternity of rage which consumes me. — Anatole France

The more you say, the less they remember. — Anatole France

The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces. — Anatole France

Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election - that was Belgium's idea of fair play, but to people here it was peculiar. To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that's left halfway unhappy you haven't heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line. The — Barbara Kingsolver

He moved on from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers, though not to Rousseau. Perhaps this was because one side of him - the side easily moved by passion - was too close to Rousseau. Instead, he approached the author of 'Candide', who was closer to another side of him - the cool and richly intellectual side.
At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.
Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun - as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun. — Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want. — Anatole Broyard

Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest. — Anatole France

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

Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark. — Anatole France

Time deals gently only with those who take it gently. — 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

It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust. — Anatole France

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

Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants. — Anatole France

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable. — Anatole Broyard

Insane Europeans who plot to cut each others' throats, now that one and the same civilisation enfolds and unites them all! — Anatole France