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.

What is more immoral than war?

Last night you were, unhinged. You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me . . . Do it again.

Hope is the most sensitive part of a poor wretch’s soul; whoever raises it only to torment him is behaving like the executioners in Hell who, they say, incessantly renew old wounds and concentrate their...

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

Ah, EugTnie, have done with virtues! Among the sacrifices that can be made to those counterfeit divinities, is there one worth an instant of the pleasures one tastes in outraging them?

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.

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. 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...

The ultimate triumph of philosophy would be to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?

Woman’s destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her.

Evil is a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such...

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

I want to be the victim of his errors.

Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly...

One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.

Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for...

In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution… even...

Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions...

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...

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...

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws...

It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose...

There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.

Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.

”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.