“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?”

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.

What is more immoral than war?

So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .

The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.

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?

The man of character is the persistent man, the man who is faithful to his own word, his own convictions, his own affections.

There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.

I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your convictions.

He will only plant that seed where the conviction of his spirit has brought brokenness, where the soil has been watered with the tears of repentance as well as the tears of joy.

A profound conviction raises a man above the feeling of ridicule.

You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.