Virtue is praised but hated. People run away from it for it is ice-cold and in this world you must keep your feet warm.

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.

One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man's suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.