The sacred demands the violation of what is normally the object of terrified respect.

Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

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.

By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men's attention.

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.

The truth is paradoxical to the extent of being exactly contrary to the usual perception.

We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.