“The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.”

Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime?

It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.

She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.

Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.

Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.

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.

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.

I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.

And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?

The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

I want to be the victim of his errors.

Wolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong.

A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people!

Evil is… a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world

What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

You get to know one another very quickly.

there’s always a process of getting to know one another.

There’s no room for sucky dads, and that’s another thing I’m proud of my bandmates for – they’re all really good parents.

And what one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go.

As a society, we are so wrapped up in our own artificial creations that we have become disconnected from one another and the wonder of our natural world.

I’m one of the artists that even though I love my soulful stuff, I love to turn up and have a good time and that’s another side of me.