Top 180 Anatole France Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “For you can always tell the gods by their appetite.”

— Anatole France

152. “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

153. “The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.”

— Anatole France

154. “When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.”

— Anatole France

155. “The sadness of churches at night moves me; I feel in them the grandeur of nothingness.”

— Anatole France

156. “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

157. “For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear; they would only feel an empty and thankless gratitude for their benefits. Without purgatory and hell, your God would indeed be a useless creature.”

— Anatole France

158. “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

159. “To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.”

— Anatole France

160. “Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”

— Anatole France

161. “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

162. “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

163. “In truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts.”

— Anatole France

164. “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges...”

— Anatole France

165. “The faculty of doubting is rare among men. A few choice spirits carry the germs of it in them, but these do not develop without training.”

— Anatole France

166. “There, in a livid light, the demons tormented the souls of the damned. The souls preserved the appearance of the bodies which had held them, and even wore some rags of clothing. These souls seemed peaceful in the midst of their torments.”

— Anatole France

167. “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

168. “Insane Europeans who plot to cut each others’ throats, now that one and the same civilisation enfolds and unites them all!”

— Anatole France

169. “We should adopt his principles and govern men as they are and not as what we’d like them to be.”

— Anatole France

170. “But I deny that He created the world; at the most He organised but an inferior part of it, and all that He touched bears the mark of His rough and unforeseeing touch.”

— Anatole France

171. “The Christian state,” said St. Cornelius, “is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin. In it the birds are obliged to work out their own salvation. How can they succeed? The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church, and the penguins have no reason for changing theirs. I mean that they are not intelligent enough to give up their present habits and assume better.”

— Anatole France

172. “You cry, “give us war!” You are visionaries. When will you become thinkers? The thinkers do not look for power and strength from any of the dreams that constitute military art: tactics, strategies, fortifications, artillery and all that rubbish. They do no believe in war, which is a fantasy; they believe in chemistry, which is a science. They know the way to put victory into an algebraic formula.”

— Anatole France

173. “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

174. “To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything. Nothing exists except that which is imagined.”

— Anatole France

175. “I see only one solution,” said St. Augustine. “The penguins will go to hell.” “But they have no soul,” observed St. Irenaeus. “It is a pity”” sighed Tertullian.”

— Anatole France

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

— Anatole France

177. “In every household the Revolution had emptied the cooking-pot.”

— Anatole France

178. “Take care, father,” said Bulloch gently, “that what you call murder and robbery may not really be war and conquest, those sacred foundations of empires, those sources of all human virtues and all human greatness.”

— Anatole France

179. “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

180. “But on what can intelligence sharpen its wits, in a country where the climate is soft and existence made easy? Even here, where necessity calls for intellectual activity, nothing is rarer than a person who thinks.”

— Anatole France