Chapter I

Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine.

God is the only being who, to govern, need not even exist.

That which is created by the mind lives more truly than matter.

Love is the desire of prostitution. There is not even one noble pleasure which cannot be reduced to prostitution.

At a play, at a ball, each one finds pleasure in all. What is art? Prostitution.

The pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious expression of joy in the multiplication of number.

_All_ is number. Number is in _all_. Number is in the individual. Intoxication is a number.

The desire of productive concentration ought to replace, in a mature being, the desire of deperdition.

Love may spring from a generous emotion: desire of prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by the desire of possession.

Love would like to come out of itself, to merge itself in its victim, as the victor in the vanquished, while still preserving the privileges of the conqueror.

The delights of whoso keeps a mistress partake at once of the angel and of the proprietor. Charity and ferocity. They are even independent of sex, of beauty, of the animal kind.

Immense depth of thought in popular phrases, hollowed out by generations of ants.

II

Of the femininity of the Church, as the reason for its omnipotence.

Of the color violet (restrained, mysterious, veiled love, color of canoness).

The priest is immense, because he makes one believe in a host of astounding matters. That the Church wants to do all and to be all, is a law of the human mind. Mankind worships authority. Priests are the servants and sectaries of the imagination. The throne and the altar, revolutionary maxim. Religious intoxication of great cities. Pantheism. I, that is all; all, that is I. Vortex.