In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
MARQUIS DE SADEGet 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.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion
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Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.
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Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves.
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No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
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The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.
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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.
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Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?
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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.
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A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people!
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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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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.
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Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
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When I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.
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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.
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Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
MARQUIS DE SADE