Top 180 Anatole France Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

103. “The law in its majesty prohibits rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.”

— Anatole France

104. “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

105. “A woman without breasts is like a bed without pillows.”

— Anatole France

106. “The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.”

— Anatole France

107. “The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges of Paris.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

110. “Armenia is dying, but it will survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not die.”

— Anatole France

111. “The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.”

— Anatole France

112. “Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.”

— Anatole France

113. “In order that knowledge be properly digested it must have been swallowed with a good appetite.”

— Anatole France

114. “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

115. “When it does not yield to the rudder,” said he to them, “the ship yields to the rock.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

117. “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

118. “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

119. “It is not customary to love what one has.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

121. “The mania of thinking renders one unfit for every activity.”

— Anatole France

122. “The man of science multiples the points of contact between man and nature.”

— Anatole France

123. “Suffering! 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

124. “One thing above all gives charm to men’s thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.”

— Anatole France

125. “Play is hand-to-hand encounter with Fate.”

— Anatole France

126. “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

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

— Anatole France

128. “There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.”

— Anatole France

129. “He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.”

— Anatole France

130. “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 do know and what you don’t.”

— Anatole France

131. “The first virtue of all really great men is that they are sincere. They eradicate hypocrisy from their hearts.”

— Anatole France

132. “I love reason, but my love does not make me a fanatic,′ Brotteaux answered. ‘Reason is our guide, a light to show us our way; but if you make a divinity of it, it will blind you and lead you into crime.”

— Anatole France

133. “It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.”

— Anatole France

134. “America, where thanks to Congress, there are forty million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments.”

— Anatole France

135. “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

136. “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

137. “God forbids suicide, and is unwilling that his creatures should destroy themselves.”

— Anatole France

138. “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

139. “Ugly women may be naturally quite as capricious as pretty ones; but as they are never petted and spoiled, and as no allowances are made for them, they soon find themselves obliged either to suppress their whims or to hide them.”

— Anatole France

140. “I ought not to fear to survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there are always some whom one can love.”

— Anatole France

141. “We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best.”

— Anatole France

142. “It is remarkable how great an influence our clothes have on our moral state.”

— Anatole France

143. “An old philosopher said to Monsieur Coignard, a Reverend Father: ‘You are a pig!’ To which Abad Coignard answered: ‘You flatter me, sir. But unfortunately, I’m only a man.’”

— Anatole France

144. “The power of love itself weakens and gradually becomes lost with age, like all the other energies of man.”

— Anatole France

145. “The heart errs like the head; its errors are not any the less fatal, and we have more trouble getting free of them because of their sweetness.”

— Anatole France

146. “They did not understand that war, which trained courage and founded the cities of barbarous and ignorant men, brings to victor himself but ruin and misery, and is nothing but a horrible and stupid crime when nations are united together by common bonds of art, science, and trade.”

— Anatole France

147. “But don’t you ever tell me the Revolution will bring equality, because men’ll never be equal. It’s just not possible. They can turn the country upside down and inside out, there’ll always be the big people and the little people, the fat ones and the thin ones.”

— Anatole France

148. “I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.”

— Anatole France

149. “It’s not by amusing oneself that one learns.”

— Anatole France

150. “All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.”

— Anatole France