Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses . . .

Man's natural character is to imitate; that of the sensitive man is to resemble as closely as possible the person whom he loves. It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.

The primary and most beautiful of nature's qualities is motion

Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear - those are the twin bases of every religion.

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.

Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.