I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?

No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.

Hope is the most sensitive part of a poor wretch's soul; whoever raises it only to torment him is behaving like the executioners in Hell who, they say, incessantly renew old wounds and concentrate their attention on that area of it that is already lacerated.

In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution... even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.