Top 100 Marquis De Sade Quotes
#1. I suggest somewhere that anyone who wishes to write and has no aptitude for it would be better off making shoes for ladies and boots for men.
Marquis De Sade
#2. In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.
Marquis De Sade
#3. Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.
Marquis De Sade
#4. Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.
Marquis De Sade
#5. And above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. There are other trades which you can take up: make boots, not books.
Marquis De Sade
#6. Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.
Marquis De Sade
#7. Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.
Marquis De Sade
#10. Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
Marquis De Sade
#11. If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.
Marquis De Sade
#12. He, being hacked and cut for three solid quarters of an hour by the vigorous hands that had taken charge of his education, was soon nothing but a single wound, from which blood spurted out on all sides.
Marquis De Sade
#13. To lie is always a necessity for women; above all when they choose to deceive, falsehood becomes vital to them.
Marquis De Sade
#14. Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.
Marquis De Sade
#15. Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.
Marquis De Sade
#16. 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
Marquis De Sade
#17. God strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me.
Marquis De Sade
#18. The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all;
Marquis De Sade
#19. Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization.
Marquis De Sade
#20. 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
Marquis De Sade
#21. Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.
Marquis De Sade
#22. 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.
Marquis De Sade
#23. I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade ... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet ... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it.
Marquis De Sade
#25. Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?
Marquis De Sade
#26. Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
Marquis De Sade
#27. The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.
Marquis De Sade
#28. Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.
Marquis De Sade
#29. One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.
Marquis De Sade
#30. The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.
Marquis De Sade
#31. Only two things are required to accredit
an alleged miracle: a mountebank and a crowd of spineless lookers-on.
Marquis De Sade
#32. The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime
for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.
Marquis De Sade
#33. All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost - the most legitimate - passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.
Marquis De Sade
#34. True happiness lies in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
Marquis De Sade
#35. Women are not made for one single man; 'tis for men at large Nature created them.
Marquis De Sade
#36. The reasoning man who rejects the superstitions of simpletons necessarily becomes their enemy; he must expect as much and be prepared to laugh at the consequences.
Marquis De Sade
#37. Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.
Marquis De Sade
#38. What you call disorder is nothing else than one of the laws of the order you comprehend not and which you have erroneously named disorder because its effects, though good for Nature, run counter to your convenience or jar your opinions.
Marquis De Sade
#39. What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you ... every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.
Marquis De Sade
#40. The state of a moral man, is one of tranquillity and peace; the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest.
Marquis De Sade
#41. Now I beg of you to tell me whether I must love a human being simply because he exists or resembles me and whether for those reasons alone I must suddenly prefer him to myself?
Marquis De Sade
#42. Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?
Marquis De Sade
#43. I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.
Marquis De Sade
#44. If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it's own reward?
Marquis De Sade
#45. 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.
Marquis De Sade
#46. The only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment.
Marquis De Sade
#47. A little less vice is virtuousness in a very vicious heart
Marquis De Sade
#48. It has been estimated that more than 50 million individuals have lost their lives to wars and religious massacres. Is there even one among them worth the blood of a single bird?
Marquis De Sade
#49. She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.
Marquis De Sade
#50. 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.
Marquis De Sade
#51. Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.
Marquis De Sade
#52. Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!
Marquis De Sade
#53. The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
Marquis De Sade
#54. In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
Marquis De Sade
#55. Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.
Marquis De Sade
#56. It is only by sacrificing everything to sensual pleasure that this being known as Man, cast into the world in spite of himself, may succeed in sowing a few roses on the thorns of life.
Marquis De Sade
#57. What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
Marquis De Sade
#59. How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!
Marquis De Sade
#60. Humane sentiments are baseless, mad, and improper; they are incredibly feeble; never do they withstand the gainsaying passions, never do they resist bare necessity.
Marquis De Sade
#61. I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
Marquis De Sade
#62. The President was in seventh heaven when he heard himself being teased like this; he strutted about and thrust his chest out; never did a man of the robe stick out his neck so far, not even one who has just hanged a man.
Marquis De Sade
#63. Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
Marquis De Sade
#64. Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
Marquis De Sade
#65. One must feel sorry for those who have strange tastes, but never insult them. Their wrong is Nature's too; they are no more responsible for having come into the world with tendencies unlike ours than are we for being born bandy-legged or well-proportioned.
Marquis De Sade
#66. Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?
Marquis De Sade
#67. Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I'd say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel.
Marquis De Sade
#68. One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
Marquis De Sade
#69. The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.
Marquis De Sade
#70. Madame, I have become a whore through good-will and libertine through virtue.
Marquis De Sade
#71. Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.
Marquis De Sade
#73. Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
Marquis De Sade
#74. And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
Marquis De Sade
#76. Evil is ... a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world
Marquis De Sade
#77. The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
Marquis De Sade
#78. 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.
Marquis De Sade
#79. There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally.
Marquis De Sade
#80. Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates.
Marquis De Sade
#81. For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there's an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives.
Marquis De Sade
#82. Don't have children: they deform women's bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.
Marquis De Sade
#85. Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers?
Marquis De Sade
#86. 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.
Marquis De Sade
#87. This monster was outfitted with faculties so gigantic that even the broadest thoroughfares would still have appeared too narrow for him.
Marquis De Sade
#89. Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?
Marquis De Sade
#90. I wished to stifle the unhappy passion which burned in my soul; but is love an illness to be cured? All I endeavored to oppose to it merely fanned its flames.
Marquis De Sade
#91. No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
Marquis De Sade
#92. The past encourages me, the present electrifies me, and I have little fear for the future; and my hope is that the rest of my life shall by far surpass the extravagances of my youth.
Marquis De Sade
#93. To enlighten mankind and improve its morals is the only lesson which we offer in this story. In reading it, may the world discover how great is the peril which follows the footsteps of those who will stop at nothing to satisfy their desires.
Marquis De Sade
#94. Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.
Marquis De Sade
#95. The imagination is the spur of delights ... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
Marquis De Sade
#96. The debility to which Nature condemned women incontestably proves that her design is for man, who then more than ever enjoys his strength, to exercise it in all the violent forms that suit him best, by means of tortures, if he be so inclined, or worse.
Marquis De Sade
#97. It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.
Marquis De Sade
#99. 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.
Marquis De Sade
#100. Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.
Marquis De Sade
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