“My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care?”

Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

For the simple reason that the first will always put the law into the service of the second.

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 well-chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.

A well-chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.

The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.

It is all right when God sends us the approval of our fellow men; however, we must never make that approval a motive in our life.

Focus on impact, not approval. If you believe you can change the world, which I hope you do, do what you believe is right and expect resistance and expect attackers. Keep calm and carry on!

Abstinence is approved of God.

I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.