“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.”

I’ve already told you: the only way to a woman’s heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution.

Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.

My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.

Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.

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.

That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you…every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing.

My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I’d not do so.

Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I’d say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel.

Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy!

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.

It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

When I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns

The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One’s own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one’s sphere of control.

Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of electromagnetism.

Everybody needs adventure, and everybody needs something to enlarge his or her lives.

There’s a lot there to enlarge you. That’s part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you. It makes you bigger. It makes you more.

The great thing is the thing of being able to see things through many points of view. That’s enlarging.

What I did for my last act as a painter, if you call me a painter, was to photograph the weave of the canvas, and enlarge it and enlarge it until it became like a landscape.