Today marks the birthday of Anatole France (1844–1924,) one of France’s most popular novelists and winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was born Jacques Anatole Thibault but signed his works “Anatole France” as a tribute to his father’s bookstore in Paris. That bookstore, named Librairie de France, specialized in literature on the French Revolution. Many prominent French scholars frequented this bookstore and influenced Anatole’s ideas.
Though Anatole mostly wrote historical and social novels, he’s best remembered for the fantasy novel L’Ile des Pingouins (1908, Eng. trans. Penguin Island.) It features an imaginary penguin civilization where a blind and somewhat deaf abbot mistakenly baptizes the penguins who then transform into human beings. Penguin Island is a satire on society and human nature in which Anatole lampooned morality, traditions, and the origin of law and religion. His other prominent novels include Les dieux ont soif (1912, The Gods Are Athirst) and La Revolte des Anges (1914, The Revolt of Angels.)
Inspirational Quotations by Anatole France
Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
It is well for the heart to be naive and for the mind not to be.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
Our passions are ourselves.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
It is not customary to love what one has.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)