“I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.”

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep.

Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.

Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it’s the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband’s mood.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care?

If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it’s own reward?

Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.

Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.

Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.

Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?

The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him.

You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere is a fool.