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.

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.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

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.

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

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

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

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.

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.

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.

One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.

Few are they who have never had a chance to achieve happiness- and fewer those who have taken that chance.

Tell me if the lovers are losers... tell me if any get more than the lovers.

You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself.

If you struck your mother or your father, it was punishable by death because you struck at the whole society. You struck at the morality of the society itself. This is what we have lost.

Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history.

Pleasures are like poppies spread: You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed.

Work made me crazy. I was tough to get along with.

I have as much artistic freedom in my television work as I have in my films.