It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns.

Thus, that happiness the two sexes cannot find with the other they will find, one in blind obedience, the other in the most energetic expression of his domination.

The more amorous the President became, the more his fatuousness made him intolerable: there is nothing in the world as comical as a lawyer in love – he is the perfect picture of gaucheness, impertinence and ineptitude.

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.

One would have to lose one’s wits to believe in a God, and to become a complete imbecile to adore Him.

Women are not made for one single man; ’tis for men at large Nature created them.

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.

Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man’s imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.

There is not a living man who does not wish to play the despot when he is stiff: it seems to him his joy is less when others appear to have as much fun as he; by an impulse of pride, very natural at this juncture, he would like to be the only one in the world capable of experiencing what he feels: the idea of seeing another enjoy as he enjoys reduces him to a kind of equality with that other, which impairs the unspeakable charm despotism causes him to feel.

Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace.