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“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, The Revolt of the Angels

“I sought out the laws which govern nature, solid or ethereal, and after much pondering I perceived that the Universe had not been formed as its pretended Creator would have us believe; I knew that all that exists, exists of itself and not by the caprice of Iahveh; that the world is itself its own creator and the spirit its own God. Henceforth I despised Iahveh for his imposture, and I hated him because he showed himself to be opposed to all that I found desirable and good: liberty, curiosity, doubt.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“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, The Revolt of the Angels

“No, let us not conquer the heavens. It is enough to have the power to do so. War engenders war, and victory defeat. God, conquered, will become Satan; Satan, conquering, will become God. May the fates spare me this terrible lot!��”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“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, The Revolt of the Angels

“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, The Revolt of the Angels

“Insane Europeans who plot to cut each others�� throats, now that one and the same civilisation enfolds and unites them all!”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“think Him limited, even very limited. I no longer believe Him to be the only God. For a long time He did not believe it Himself; in the beginning He was a polytheist; later, His pride and the flattery of His worshippers made Him a monotheist. His ideas have little connection; He is less powerful than He is thought to be. And, to speak candidly, He is not so much a god as a vain and ignorant demiurge.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“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, The Revolt of the Angels

“This book bore the label R>3214 VIII/2. And this painful truth was suddenly borne in upon the mind of Monsieur Sariette: to wit, that the most scientific system of numbering will not help to find a book if the book is no longer in its place.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“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, The Revolt of the Angels

“Man is summed up in Art. All the rest is moonshine.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“The two angels found her alone, reading. As they drew near she lifted her great eyes whose deeps of molten gold little sparks of light were forever a-dance. Her brows were contracted into that austere fold which we see on the Pythian Apollo; her nose was perfect and descended without a curve; her lips were compressed and imparted a disdainful and supercilious air to her whole countenance. Her tawny hair, with its gleaming lights, was carelessly adorned with the tattered remnants of a huge bird of prey, her garments lay about her in dark and shapeless folds. She was leaning her chin on an ill-tended hand.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“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, The Revolt of the Angels

“-Veo aquí materia suficiente para formar muchos Tomás de Aquino y muchos Arrios, si las inteligencias no hubieran perdido su antiguo ardor lo mismo para el bien que para el mal.”
― Anatole France, La rebelión de los Ángeles

“That is what is most lacking in our people," she said, "they do not think.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of Angels

“Having, he explained, studied Nature, he had found her in perpetual conflict with the teachings of the Master he served. This Master, greedy of praise, whom he had for a long time adored, appeared to him now as an ignorant, stupid, and cruel tyrant.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“In point of fact, Christianity has run contrary to art in so much as it has not favoured the study of the nude. Art is the representation of nature, and nature is pre-eminently the human body; it is the nude.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“Monsieur," said Madame des Aubels, "go away, I beg you." But the Angel hearkened not, and continued: "Saint Augustine, in his True Religion, Chapter XIII; Saint Gregory, in his Morals, Chapter XXIV; Isidore—��" "Monsieur, let me get my things on; I am in a hurry." "In his treatise on The Greatest Good, Book I, Chapter XII; Bede on Job—��" "Oh, please, Monsieur ...”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“The French having passed from feudalism to monarchy, and from monarchy to a financial oligarchy, will easily pass from a financial oligarchy to anarchy.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“I freely acknowledge that it is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

“-Es de lo que más adolece nuestro pueblo -dijo ella-: no piensa.
Y añadió al cabo de unos instantes:
-Pero ¿en qué podrían ejecutar su agudeza las inteligencias que viven en un país donde el clima es templado y la existencia fácil? Incluso aquí, donde la necesidad apremia a los espíritus, nada es tan raro como un ser que piensa.”
― Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels