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

What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you...every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

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.

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?

Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.

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

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.