“Good music is very close to primitive language.”
“There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.”
“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.”
“The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.”
“All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.”
“It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.”
“Gaiety --a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.”
“The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.”
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”
“There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.”
“It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.”
“The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.”
“Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.”
“In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.”
“Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.”
“The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.”
“The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.”
“Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.”
“People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.”
“Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.”
“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.”
“Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.”
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.”
“Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.”
“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.”
“The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.”
“The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.”
“The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for its shape and comfort.”
“Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man -- it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.”
“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.”