Top 180 Anatole France Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.”

— Anatole France

52. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

56. “History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.”

— Anatole France

57. “Nothing spoils a confession like repentance.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

65. “Silence is the wit of fools.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

67. “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

68. “On croit mourir pour la patrie ; on meurt pour des industriels.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

74. “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

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

77. “Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.”

— Anatole France

78. “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

79. “It is only the poor who are forbidden to beg.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

84. “The future is hidden even from those who make it.”

— Anatole France

85. “Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

89. “So long as society is founded on injustice, the function of the laws will be to defend injustice. And the more unjust they are the more respectable they will seem.”

— Anatole France

90. “What we call happiness is what we do not know.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

92. “What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!”

— Anatole France

93. “Man is summed up in Art. All the rest is moonshine.”

— Anatole France

94. “The impotence of God is infinite.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

96. “In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.”

— Anatole France

97. “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

98. “Universal peace will be realized, not because man will become better, but because a new order of things, a new science, new economic necessities, will impose peace.”

— Anatole France

99. “Custom alone regulates morals.”

— Anatole France

100. “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