“One must feel sorry for those who have strange tastes, but never insult them. Their wrong is Nature’s too; they are no more responsible for having come into the world with tendencies unlike ours than are we for being born bandy-legged or well-proportioned.”

It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates.

I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it.

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.

We must have a spirit of power towards the enemy, a spirit of love towards men, and a spirit of self-control towards ourselves.

Give him threepence, since he must make a gain out of what he learns.

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Into each life some rain must fall.

The adolescent must never be treated as a child, for that is a stage of life that he has surpassed.

All things must change to something new, to something strange.