Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I'd say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel.

The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I'd not do so.

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.

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.