Top 180 Anatole France Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.”

— Anatole France

53. “The duty of literature is to note what counts, and to light up what is suited to the light. If it ceases to choose and to love, it becomes like a woman who gives herself without preference.”

— Anatole France

54. “Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.”

— Anatole France

55. “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

56. “Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.”

— Anatole France

57. “Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.”

— Anatole France

58. “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

59. “Never lend books, for no one ever returns them.”

— Anatole France

60. “It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.”

— Anatole France

61. “A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.”

— Anatole France

62. “We live between two dense clouds; the forgetting of what was and the uncertainty of what will be.”

— Anatole France

63. “A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.”

— Anatole France

64. “Lack of understanding is a great power. Sometimes it enables men to conquer the world.”

— Anatole France

65. “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

66. “Irony and pity are two good counselors: one, in smiling, makes life pleasurable; the other, who cries, makes it sacred.”

— Anatole France

67. “It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.”

— Anatole France

68. “People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.”

— Anatole France

69. “Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.”

— Anatole France

70. “Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.”

— Anatole France

71. “Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.”

— Anatole France

72. “What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.”

— Anatole France

73. “What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.”

— Anatole France

74. “We have drugs to make women speak, but none to keep them silent.”

— Anatole France

75. “It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.”

— Anatole France

76. “You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.”

— Anatole France

77. “Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.”

— Anatole France

78. “Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.”

— Anatole France

79. “That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.”

— Anatole France

80. “Silence is the wit of fools.”

— Anatole France

81. “Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.”

— Anatole France

82. “What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.”

— Anatole France

83. “A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.”

— Anatole France

84. “The impotence of God is infinite.”

— Anatole France

85. “No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will. Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.”

— Anatole France

86. “Our passions are ourselves.”

— Anatole France

87. “Custom alone regulates morals.”

— Anatole France

88. “Caress your phrase tenderly; it will end by smiling at you.”

— Anatole France

89. “Jealousy is a virtue of democracies which preserves them from tyrants.”

— Anatole France

90. “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

91. “When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.”

— Anatole France

92. “Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.”

— Anatole France

93. “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

94. “Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned.”

— Anatole France

95. “The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can’t understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.”

— Anatole France

96. “Time deals gently only with those who take it gently.”

— Anatole France

97. “I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.”

— Anatole France

98. “It is not easy to be a pretty woman without causing mischief.”

— Anatole France

99. “People who don’t count won’t count.”

— Anatole France

100. “Word-carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry: you must join your sentences smoothly.”

— Anatole France