Anatole France Best Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

The best sentence? The shortest. — 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

The more you say, the less they remember. — 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

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest. — Anatole France

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence is the wit of fools. — Anatole France

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

The impotence of God is infinite. — 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

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

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

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