Daily Inspiration Quote by Anatole France

France skewers a familiar moral sleight of hand: the person who prides themselves on being "very honest" while treating petty dishonesty as a kind of sport. The sentence is built like a trap. He grants the flattering premise - honesty - then snaps it shut with the punchline: for some, the feeling of getting a "bargain" depends on having outwitted someone. The humor is dry, but the target is serious: self-image is often less a mirror than a costume.

The key word is "unless". It implies that the transaction itself isn't complete until a little theft has occurred, as if fairness were an incomplete draft. France also picks "a merchant" deliberately, not "a friend" or "a neighbor". The merchant is socially legible as someone you're allowed to squeeze; commerce becomes the alibi. Cheating a businessperson can be reframed as savvy, even virtuous, because the cultural script casts the seller as already trying to cheat you. Everyone gets to feel righteous while behaving badly.

In late 19th-century France, with its expanding consumer markets and sharpening class tensions, that attitude would have been easy to spot: suspicion of shopkeepers, resentment toward perceived middlemen, a growing belief that intelligence equals extraction. France, a novelist with a satirist's knife, exposes the small hypocrisies that let people keep their halo while picking pockets. The line isn't about bargains; it's about the stories people tell to make predation feel like principle.