There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.
MARQUIS DE SADEThe infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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 -
Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.
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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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses . . .
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
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Even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
There you have Nature, there you have her intentions, there you have her scheme: a perpetual action and reaction, a host of vices, a host of virtues, in one word, a perfect equilibrium resulting from the equality of good and evil on earth.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Can we become other than what we are?
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Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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?
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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?
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Hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
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The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
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Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.
MARQUIS DE SADE