I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.