In order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.

Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving...

Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.

For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there’s an end to it: his annihilation is final...

All creatures are born isolated and have no need of one another.”

But to declare his wishes only in some unknown corner of Asia, to choose the most double-dealing and the most superstitious of peoples as followers, and the vilest, most ridiculous, and most roguish working man...

Humane sentiments are baseless, mad, and improper; they are incredibly feeble; never do they withstand the gainsaying passions, never do they resist bare necessity.

Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make...

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

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...

Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not...

Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me

It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women

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 is; and were it, I’d not...

…and above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be...

She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.

The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.

The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.

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

Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.

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

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.

Wolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong: there you have Nature, there you have her intentions, there you have her scheme:...

Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.

The reasoning man who rejects the superstitions of simpletons necessarily becomes their enemy; he must expect as much and be prepared to laugh at the consequences.

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.

The primary and most beautiful of Nature’s qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times, but this motion is simply a perpetual consequence of crimes, she conserves it by means of crimes only.

Do the meager pleasures you have been able to enjoy during your fall compensate for the torments which now rend your heart? Happiness therefore lies only in virtue,my child, and all the sophistries of its...

Oh! my friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think…

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.

The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.

What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you…every man wants to be a tyrant...

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,...

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.

‘Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of...

Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends… with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of...

…those who deny or oppose these so pleasant delights (of virtue), do so only from jealousy, you may be sure, from the barbarous pleasure of making others as guilty and unhappy as they are. They...

¡Creedlo, ciudadanos, aquel a quien la espada material de las leyes no detiene tampoco se detendrá por el temor moral de los suplicios del infierno, de los que se burla desde su infancia!. En una...

The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination...

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in...

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.

The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.

True felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.