We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy...Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.

Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.

One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

If a person is not free, his right is restricted.

Bookshop Customer: 'Who wrote the bible?'Customer's friend: 'Jesus.

Some day, we will know the value of suffering, but then we will no longer be able to suffer.

Let the mind contemplate, let the pen scribble, the oeuvre would be eccentric, peculiar to a reader's eye.

"Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot."

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

The shackles and the chains, the violence and aggression, the pettiness and scorn, the jealousy and hatred, the tempest and discord.

The future is plump with promise.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean.

When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can't simulate in a sedentary position.