“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.”

Respectable people, What bastards!

Everything is only a dream.

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.

Lovers are made by a kiss.

A new dynasty is never founded without a struggle. Blood makes good manure.

My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilization reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?

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.

I appreciate me in my ups and downs, lost and founds.

When a man appreciates only eating and sleeping, what excellence has he over the reptiles?

This barren verbiage, current among men, Light coin, the tinsel clink of compliment.

Men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success.

Wherever I am when you feel sick at heart and weary of life, or when you stumble and fall and don’t know if you can get up again, think of me. I will be watching and smiling and cheering you on.

For what I have publish’d, I can only hope to be pardon’d; but for what I have burned, I deserve to be prais’d.

People go into politics because they want the affirmation, and they want the applause.

For all at last return to the sea- to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.