Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.

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.

Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.

The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.

Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?

Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.