Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

We are nearly all composed of such a complex mixture of human qualities that in each one of us reside both masculine and feminine principles: what man is without any female attribute and what woman never demonstrates any masculine characteristics?

The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.

doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.