“In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.”

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.

One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.

Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.

Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race.

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

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?

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

The looks, the stares, the giggles . . . I wanted to show everybody that I could do better and also that I could read.

I grew up being an artist, but also rock-climbing and traveling the world and teaching my kids.

It is true that we are made of dust. And the world is also made of dust. But the dust has motes rising.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!

For where there is love of man, there is also love of the art.

The 31th of May, I perceived in the same water more of those Animals, as also some that were somewhat bigger.

You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you’re okay with who you are or where you came from.