Justice & Law Quote by Georges Bizet

Art doesn’t come from tidying up human behavior; it comes from rubbing against it. Bizet’s line is a deliberately scandalous defense of music’s messy fuel supply: desire, obsession, transgression, superstition, violence. Read literally, it’s outrageous - suppress adultery and you can’t write a note? But the exaggeration is the point. He’s poking at a bourgeois instinct to disinfect culture, to demand beauty without the moral complications that produce it.

The subtext is twofold. First, Bizet is arguing that art is not a virtue-reward system. Music isn’t a hymn for good conduct; it’s an instrument for dramatizing conflict. Take away the forbidden and you take away tension, and tension is where melody, harmony, rhythm - the whole machinery of feeling - gets its voltage. Second, he’s defending the artist’s right to look where polite society won’t. “Fanaticism” and “the supernatural” aren’t endorsements; they’re narrative engines, the kinds of irrational forces that make characters (and audiences) reveal themselves.

Context matters: Bizet is the composer of Carmen, a work that was attacked in its day for its sexual independence, criminality, and refusal to moralize. His quote reads like a preemptive rebuttal to cultural gatekeepers who wanted opera to model respectability. He’s essentially saying: if you want art that never risks contamination, you don’t want art. You want decoration.