Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it.

In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution... even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.