Pithy Prose: The Wit and Wisdom of Anatole France

Part 4 of an occasional series

I am a collector of quotations. I have been ever since I learned how to write, I mean professionally, not in primary school.

I am particularly fond of what I like to call "pithy prose". These short quotations can cover an unlimited variety of subjects: love, religion, politics, human nature, etc. What unites them is their ability to say more in one or two sentences than could be expressed in a thousand-word treatise. It's like being able to pour a liter of liquid into a half-liter bottle.

They are superb examples of Mark Twain's famous dictum, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

In principle, all writers and public speakers are capable of producing pithy prose, but clearly some are better at it than others.

Any collection of pithy prose must necessarily be biased in terms of what it includes and excludes. I make no apologies for my selections, only for the hundreds of other meritorious quotations I had to leave out.

No one will agree with all these quotations; this was not their intention. You may even find some of them repugnant or outrageous. This was their intention.

We seldom learn anything of value from what we already agree with. Only those ideas that grate on our nerves can open our minds. As with oysters, irritation can produce pearls. So if anything you are about to read annoys or shocks you, try to think clearly and dispassionately about what it is saying. You will either be confirmed in your current belief or shaken into re-examining it.

Either way, you win!

This article is part of an occasional series. In each article, I will be offering more amusing, educating, and exasperating quotations to your judgment. But just to be certain that we agree on what we are talking about, here it is in a nutshell.

Pithy Prose: A quotation where at first you may not be quite certain what it means. But when you become certain, you become equally certain that it couldn't have been said better any other way. In short, big ideas in small packages.

If you have a better definition of pithy prose, please contact me. I would love to hear it.

Who Is Anatole France?

Anatole France (1844 - 1924), whose real name was Jacques Anatole Thibault, was a prolific French novelists and essayist. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his collected works.

1. A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

2. All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

3. 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 know and what you don't.

4. An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.

5. Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.

6. 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.

7. Existence would be intolerable if we were never to dream.

8. History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

9. I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.

10. If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

11. Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.

12. In art as in love, instinct is enough.

13. It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.

14. It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion.

15 It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.

16. Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

17. No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will.

18. Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

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

20. Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.

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

22. The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

23. The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

24. The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.

25. 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.

26. The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

27. There are very honest people who do not think that they have had a bargain unless they have cheated a merchant.

28. To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.

29. Until one has loved an animal a part of one's soul remains unawakened.

30. 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.

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

32. 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!

33. What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

34. Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.

35. You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.

Previously in this Series

Part 1: Pithy Prose: The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
Part 2: Pithy Prose: The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde
Part 3: Pithy Prose: The Wit and Wisdom of People Named "W"

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