Daily Inspiration Quote by Anatole France

Anatole France twists the knife with a single, impeccably French inversion: he files chastity not under virtue but under “sexual aberrations,” a phrase that borrows the clinical coldness of medical and moral policing, then turns it back on the policers. The joke lands because it treats abstinence as just another kink - not an escape from desire, but a peculiar way of staging it. Chastity becomes less a neutral absence than an active posture, a performance with its own rituals, rewards, and fantasies of purity.

The subtext is a rejection of the era’s bourgeois moral bookkeeping, where sex is either sanctioned (within marriage) or pathologized (outside it). By calling chastity “strangest,” France implies that what’s marketed as “natural” is often the most unnatural: a discipline that requires constant vigilance, repression, and storytelling. The word “strangest” also smuggles in a kind of amused anthropology. He’s not praising libertinage so much as exposing how societies eroticize renunciation - how prohibition can intensify fixation, how virtue can become obsession.

Context matters: France is writing from the late 19th/early 20th-century French milieu where anticlericalism, skepticism toward authority, and satire of public morality were intellectual sport. Before Freud becomes mainstream shorthand, France is already diagnosing culture’s habit of turning sexuality into a tribunal. The line works because it collapses the hierarchy: chastity isn’t above sex; it’s one of sex’s more elaborate disguises.