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

It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror.

You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.

My true church is a whorehouse – the only one that gives me true satisfaction.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.