“We devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.”

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

Any enjoyment is weakened when shared.

Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Can we become other than what we are?

I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.

The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.

Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.

The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.

Hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.

All men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of those principles; according to which never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other.

If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws.

Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves.

There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.

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

What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.