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

Sex without pain is like food without taste

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion

One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?

If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?

Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man’s imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices.

I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade…

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.

The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.

Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.

Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.

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

Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest.

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

Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?

The looks, the stares, the giggles . . . I wanted to show everybody that I could do better and also that I could read.

I’m one of those freaky people that actually reads books.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

If I read the newspaper I come out dirtier than I went in. If I read my Bible, I come out cleaner than I went in, and I like being clean!

I started reading about people of great accomplishment… and it dawned on me suddenly that the person who has the most to do with what happens in your life is you.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.