Your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments; hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.

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

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.

The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

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.