I teach the art of turning anguish into delight.

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.

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

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit; to become delightful, happiness must be tainted with poison.

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.

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.