“Symmetry is what makes the world beautiful.”
Death the Kid Quotes
3 quotes from Soul Eater, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Lord Death's son, three stripes on one side of his hair and none on the other, undone by a crooked picture frame. The symmetry gag is a running one, and it is also the plot: in the manga, completing himself is how he becomes the next Shinigami.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“We can't be too happy. People still inhabit this world. There will always be more evil to face. We were able to scrape through this time because of Maka. But sooner or later another Kishin will rise up.”
In the manga the person who has to deal with that next kishin is Kid himself, because the ending kills Lord Death and makes his son the Shinigami. The anime, which finishes four years before the manga did, cannot know that, and so it hands Kid the adult's line without the adult's job. The result is a strange fit: a boy warning that the peace is temporary, in a version of the story where his father is fine and will apparently go on being fine. The line is right in both versions. Only one of them makes him pay for being right, and it is the one the anime never got to.
“You disgust me. I am a Grim Reaper. I refuse to grant anyone the freedom to kill!”
The contradiction is deliberate and the show does not hide it. The academy Kid's father runs is a school for lethal force; its students collect ninety-nine human souls and a witch's to graduate, and the whole point of a meister is to make a weapon deadly. So the reaper's refusal here is a refusal of something his own institution licenses daily. The distinction the series draws is between killing under a rule and killing for appetite, which is the same line Lord Death draws when he explains that Asura became a kishin by eating his own weapon. Kid's disgust is real; it is also a monopoly defending itself, and the better reading holds both.
Read Death the Kid's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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It is the series' most quoted line and it is a running gag, which the quote sites have politely forgotten. Kid says it as the son of a god of death who has three stripes on one side of his hair and none on the other, and the show gets its best comedy from watching the pursuit of balance collapse him into a heap because a picture frame is crooked. The reason the gag runs so long is that it is doing real work: the manga's ending turns on Kid completing the Sanzu lines and becoming a whole Shinigami, so the asymmetry he cannot stand is his own incompleteness. That is a good idea. This sentence is the least of it, and lifting it out as an aesthetic creed is like quoting a hypochondriac on health.