“Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.”

Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.

That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you…every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing.

My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I’d not do so.

Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I’d say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel.

Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy!

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

Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.

It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

When I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.

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

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.

Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.

So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.