Religions are the cradles of despotism.

One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

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?

Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

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.

I don't know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the mind's frailties.

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.