“How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us.”

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.

Your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask.

The breaking wave and the muscle as it contracts obey the same law. Delicate line gathers the body’s total strength in a bold balance. Shall my soul meet so severe a curve, journeying on its way to form?

The bird building her home on your windowsill has every nest destroyed before. The spider that is delicately weaving a masterpiece has had every single thread broken before. And despite it all, they try again.

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights.

To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.

Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.