...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food

War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.

She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her work at damnation; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And even more than her body of perdition, he hated her loving soul.

Military men are the scourges of the world.