No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.
One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.
Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?
I don’t know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the mind’s frailties.
How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!
Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
Now I beg of you to tell me whether I must love a human being simply because he exists or resembles me and whether for those reasons alone I must suddenly prefer him to myself?
Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.
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.
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.