“It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.”

It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.

She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.

Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.

Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.

The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages.

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.

I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.

And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?

The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

I want to be the victim of his errors.

Wolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong.

A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people!

Evil is… a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world

It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns