“If something’s just, I’ll let myself be hacked to bits for it.”

When you have a sorrow that is too great it leaves no room for any other.

The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one’s intellect to know it better.

If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them.

Don’t go looking at me like that because you’ll wear your eyes out.

Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Let us eat, drink and satisfy our coarse appetites, but let us keep our souls sacred and apart.

I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.

Violence has never prospered, you can’t remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!

I am an artist. I am here to live out loud.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things. They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

People might look at you a bit funny, but it’s okay. Artists are allowed to be a bit different.

Freedom of mind allows us to keep receiving what we didn’t know we needed.

Don’t allow people behaviour to turn you into a person you are not.

Change allows us to live as the best version of ourselves.

I’m not going to say I’m sorry for the things that I’ve done because I think that it allows me to tell a story.

Don’t allow the world to define your life. Instead, allow yourself to open the eyes of the world.

You are allowed to unfollow toxic people.

You must never give in to despair. Allow yourself to slip down that road and you surrender to your lowest instincts.