“If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it’s own reward?”

Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep.

Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.

Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it’s the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband’s mood.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care?

Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.

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.

The forms of the world have their place, but in another way, there is nothing there. To be free, we need to respect both of these truths.

I think the pearls – one is a necklace, and another you have five hundred pounds of pearls, which may be one million pearls in a bowl – really show a kind of [society] condition.

If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still.

Another one is Eric Clapton. Another one is Phil Collins. Eminem, Kanye West I like all those people.

There are still many great surviving talents: Stevie Winwood. Another great talent is Stevie Wonder.

It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.

It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

That vie with one another (“qui rivalisent à l’envi,” Fr.), by the increase of their armies and the improvement of their engines of murder (“engins meurtriers”, Fr).