Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.

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

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

Evil is... a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world

It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns

One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants.

One must feel sorry for those who have strange tastes, but never insult them. Their wrong is Nature's too; they are no more responsible for having come into the world with tendencies unlike ours than are we for being born bandy-legged or well-proportioned.