“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.”

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.

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.

if I was defended they simply said I had been defended. But I don’t think they have taken any effort at maligning me or maligning gays or making any effort to give to people anything that wasn’t news.

Anything you can do needs to be done, so pick up the tool of your choice and get started.

The more I resist anything, the stronger it gets.

A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken-down old house no good for anything but chasing kids has to trip over us. Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?

I’m never absolutely sure of anything, and I don’t want to be. You’re either right and you’ll pull through, or you’re not. We’re never going to be right about everything, and we’ve certainly been wrong.

How can you think that that will evoke the past? It doesn’t even have to evoke anything, but anyway, it’s how we’re living. It’s this moment where nobody has to immediately think too much about how things are being documented. It’s a great time.

Anything that I do, I try to make it as good as I possibly can.

It’s not easy for a mother and son to sing a duet. You can’t just sing about anything.