Quotes

Passion, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and . . . music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.

The two valets sit at the top of the table, but at least I have the honor of being placed above the cooks.

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

I like to enjoy myself, but rest assured that I can be as serious as anyone else can.

They shoot the white girl first.

[ Of Bill Clinton :] This is our first black President.

This is not a story to pass on.

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.

Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Thunder on the Left.

When Abraham Lincoln was murdered

They have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.

[ Drawing his beard aside before placing his head on the block :] This hath not offended the king.

Utopia.

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty. . . . Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.

Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour,

Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.

Si les triangles faisoient un Dieu, ils lui donneroient trois côtés .

No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

How can anyone be Persian?

Quand je me jouë à ma chatte, qui sçait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d’elle .

Chaque homme porte la forme entière de l’humaîne condition .

I want . . . death to find me planting my cabbages.

The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

C’est ce dequoy j’ay le plus de peur que la peur .

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, and ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray.

I am myself the matter of my book.

People feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, of any kind of nature—and it won’t hurt your feelings—like it’s happening to your clothing.

Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.

I just want to be wonderful.

A career is born in public—talent in privacy.

[ Declining an invitation to a party :]

[ Responding to a question about whether she had posed for a calendar in 1947 with nothing on :] I had the radio on.

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.

Le Malade Imaginaire .

I will maintain it before the whole world.

What the devil was he doing in that galley?

My fair one, let us swear an eternal friendship.

Par ma foi! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j’en susse rien .

All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.

Here [in Paris] they hang a man first, and try him afterwards.

You’ve asked for it, Georges Dandin, you’ve asked for it.

Il faut manger pour vivre et non pas vivre pour manger .