There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.

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.

Wherever you are, however you got there, if it's good, you're meant to be there either because you earned it or life led you there and you were smart enough to hold on.

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves.

If Irish or Italian culture dies in America it really isn't that big a deal. They will still exist in Italy and Ireland. Not so with us. There is no other place. North America is our old country.

... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.

And I think for some - not all - but for some Democrats, the issue of immigration is better politically if they just leave it the way it is now because they can use it against Republicans.

These are planes of consciousness, and I think human beings exist on two planes of consciousness, the soul and the ego.

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

Job dissatisfaction is the number one factor in whether you survive your first heart attack.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.