Don't have children: they deform women's bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it's the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband's mood.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep, when I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.