“Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.”

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it. Skepticism is the first step toward truth.

My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.

One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.

Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.

Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.

All children are essentially criminal.

If you disturb the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow is no longer beautiful.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

Does anyone really know where they’re going to?

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one’s innocence with the loss of one’s prejudices.

Only a fool wants war, but once a war starts then it cannot be fought half-heartedly. It cannot even be fought with regret, but must be waged with a savage joy in defeating the enemy, and it is that savage joy that inspires our bards to write their greatest songs about love and war.

The savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite.

They died hard, those savage men – like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

This is a fierce bad rabbit; look at his savage whiskers, and his claws and his turned-up tail.

We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.

Love was the most savage monster of all.

The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages.

Are we savages or what?