What you call disorder is nothing else than one of the laws of the order you comprehend not and which you have erroneously named disorder because its effects, though good for Nature, run counter to your convenience or jar your opinions.

She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.

Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.

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.

Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.

I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.

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