Top 100 De Sade Quotes
#2. When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
doomed to communicate
with Satan who was us-
ing my sickness as his
home away from home,
and there's your proof.
Dennis Cooper
#3. Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
Philip Kaufman
#4. I despise Wednesdays! They are the Marquis de Sade of the work week. Wednesday are so awful that...wait..what? It's Thurs? (face-palm)
L.G.A. McIntyre
#5. Julian was the son of Diokles of Sparta, also known as Diokles the Butcher. That man made the Marquis de Sade look like Ronald McDonald. (Ben)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#6. Relentlessly savage, 'The Passion' plays like the 'Gospel according to the Marquis de Sade'
David Ansen
#7. Is it true that in Petersburg you belonged to some secret society of bestial sensualists? Is it true that you could give lessons to the Marquis De Sade?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#8. I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin.
"That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously.
Roberto Bolano
#9. It's ludicrous to even talk about (Marquis) de Sade, let alone indulge in all that, when people are being tortured and suffering for real, not for sexual games. I have no interest either in being a victim or in turning others into victims.
Francoise Gilot
#10. A perversion must be baptized and patronized (the Marquis De Sade and Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch were on to something).
Philippe Lejeune
#11. I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#13. A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
Albert Camus - As quoted in Albert Camus : The Invincible Summer (1958) by Albert Maquet, p. 86; a remark made about the Marquis de Sade.
Albert Camus
#14. My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#15. The fact is there hasn't been a thrilling new erogenous zone discovered since de Sade.
George Gilder
#16. The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind ... From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.
Georges Bataille
#17. The socialized state is to justice, order, and freedom what the Marquis de Sade is to love.
William F. Buckley Jr.
#18. De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Aldous Huxley
#19. Whipping, caning, chains, restraints, the cat-o'-nine tails and many other devices beloved of the Marquis de Sade are employed in more extreme sado-masochistic relationships. A spanking, though, s every girl knows, is more about pleasure than pain.
Chloe Thurlow
#20. He's not getting out of here again ... But you don't have to go all Marquis de Sade on him either. Just kill him or let me.
Rachel Caine
#21. 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
#22. My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!
Marquis De Sade
#23. Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain
Marquis De Sade
#24. In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.
Marquis De Sade
#25. Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.
Marquis De Sade
#26. Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.
Marquis De Sade
#27. The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
Marquis De Sade
#28. 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
#29. Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.
Marquis De Sade
#30. 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
#31. Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
Marquis De Sade
#34. Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
Marquis De Sade
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.
Marquis De Sade
#38. To lie is always a necessity for women; above all when they choose to deceive, falsehood becomes vital to them.
Marquis De Sade
#39. Do the meager pleasures you have been able to enjoy during your fall compensate for the torments which now rend your heart? Happiness therefore lies only in virtue,my child, and all the sophistries of its detractors can never procure a single one of its delights.
Marquis De Sade
#40. Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?
Marquis De Sade
#41. Imperious, angry, furious, extreme in all things, with a disturbance in the moral imagination unlike any the world has ever known - there you have me in a nutshell: and one more thing, kill me or take me as I am, for I will not change
Marquis De Sade
#42. Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.
Marquis De Sade
#43. Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.
Richard Seaver
#44. Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.
Marquis De Sade
#45. It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.
Marquis De Sade
#46. 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
#47. God strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me.
Marquis De Sade
#48. The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all;
Marquis De Sade
#49. Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.
Marquis De Sade
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.
Marquis De Sade
#55. The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
Marquis De Sade
#56. 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
#57. 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.
Marquis De Sade
#59. 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
#60. Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?
Marquis De Sade
#61. It is certainly no crime to depict the bizarre ideas that nature inspires.
Marquis De Sade
#62. Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
Marquis De Sade
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.
Marquis De Sade
#66. 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
#68. Only two things are required to accredit
an alleged miracle: a mountebank and a crowd of spineless lookers-on.
Marquis De Sade
#69. 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
#70. Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
Marquis De Sade
#71. 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
#73. True happiness lies in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
Marquis De Sade
#74. Women are not made for one single man; 'tis for men at large Nature created them.
Marquis De Sade
#75. I am about to put foward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.
Marquis De Sade
#76. 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
#77. Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.
Marquis De Sade
#78. The greatest pleasures are born of conquered repugnancies.
Marquis De Sade
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. In order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.
Marquis De Sade
#82. She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying
her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place.
It's folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying;
for death looked lovely in her face.
Francesco Petrarca
#83. There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.
Marquis De Sade
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.
Rikki Ducornet
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
Marquis De Sade
#91. Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?
Marquis De Sade
#92. 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.
Marquis De Sade
#93. 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
#94. When a man loves a woman, as our old troubadours used to say, even if he has heard or seen something that puts his beloved in a bad light, he should believe neither his ears nor his eyes, he should listen to his heart alone.
Marquis De Sade
#95. The only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment.
Marquis De Sade
#96. A little less vice is virtuousness in a very vicious heart
Marquis De Sade
#97. The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.
Marquis De Sade
#98. Oh! my friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think ...
Marquis De Sade
#99. 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
#100. 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
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