Success Quote by Anatole France

France builds this sentence like a set of marching orders, then quietly sabotages the idea that marching is enough. The parallel structure ("not only... but also...") reads like a checklist for achievement culture, but the twist is that the so-called soft stuff - dreaming and believing - isn’t decorative; it’s positioned as the missing engine. He’s not praising vague optimism so much as indicting a certain bourgeois faith in procedures: act, plan, execute. Those verbs are sturdy, rational, respectable. France insists they’re insufficient without the interior forces that make risk tolerable and direction legible.

The subtext is almost political. A late-19th-century French novelist who lived through the Third Republic’s churn knew that institutions can produce plans endlessly while avoiding transformation. Dreaming here isn’t escapism; it’s the capacity to imagine alternatives when the present is busy congratulating itself. Belief isn’t religious piety either, but commitment - the psychological buy-in that lets people persist past the first embarrassment, the first failure, the first public shrug.

Rhetorically, the line works because it refuses to choose between romance and realism. It pairs the outward (act/plan) with the inward (dream/believe), suggesting greatness is a two-system operation: logistics plus vision, strategy plus nerve. Coming from a novelist, that’s also a quiet defense of art itself. Fiction trains the dream muscle; culture supplies the belief that new futures are thinkable, then doable.