Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.
Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.
Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.
Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.
I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.
There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.
No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.
Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?
They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.
Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.
Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!
Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.
'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.
We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.
If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.
Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses . . .
The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.
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 for others!
The ultimate triumph of philosophy would be to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.
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.
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.
Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.
'Sex' is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.
The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.
Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.
Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers?
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?
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.
Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.
Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization.
Humane sentiments are baseless, mad, and improper; they are incredibly feeble; never do they withstand the gainsaying passions, never do they resist bare necessity.
My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.
Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy...Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.
Now I beg of you to tell me whether I must love a human being simply because he exists or resembles me and whether for those reasons alone I must suddenly prefer him to myself?
The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.
Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?
Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.
I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime - for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.
There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.
The primary and most beautiful of Nature's qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times, but this motion is simply a perpetual consequence of crimes, she conserves it by means of crimes only.