Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?
Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!
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.
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, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?
The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion.
True happiness lies in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
Can we become other than what we are?
I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.
Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.
All universal moral principles are idle fancies.
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.
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.
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.
The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.
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.
No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.
We monsters are necessary to nature also.
Sex without pain is like food without taste.
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!