Daily Inspiration Quote by Anatole France

France’s line flatters dreaming without pretending it’s decorative. “Intolerable” is the tell: he’s not praising imagination as a pleasant accessory, he’s diagnosing it as a pressure valve. In a single sentence, the novelist makes existence sound like something that bears down - repetitive, bureaucratic, moralizing, maybe even absurd - and then suggests the one human counterforce that doesn’t require permission: the mind’s ability to invent an elsewhere.

The phrasing is quietly radical. “If we were never to dream” isn’t about sleeping; it’s about being denied interior freedom. The conditional frames a world in which fantasy, aspiration, and mental escape have been regulated out of us. That’s not far from the late 19th-century Europe France inhabited: a culture of rapid modernization, rigid social codes, and political turbulence where public life could feel scripted and private life increasingly policed by class, church, and state. Dreaming becomes a form of soft resistance - not a manifesto, but a refusal to let reality have the final word.

There’s also a novelist’s self-justification tucked inside it. If dreams are necessary to keep life livable, then stories aren’t frivolous; they’re infrastructure for the psyche. France implies that human endurance depends on an ongoing trade with the unreal: hope, art, desire, the alternative future you rehearse in your head before you can build it in the world. Without that contraband, “existence” turns from a life into a sentence.