“It all seemed a hollow sham now – that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she’d had enough of that; she wanted to live!”

Man’s highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.

Every wave is a water sprite who swims in the current, each current is a path which snakes towards my palace, and my palace is fluidly built at the bottom of the lake, in the triangle of earth, fire and water.

Nothing develops intelligence like travel.

Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth.

I do not despair in the least of ultimate triumph. I repeat it with intense conviction.

In Paris, everything’s for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.

Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.

Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.

These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here

Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy – love which creates life?

Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.

Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.

Art for me…is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.