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 SADEConscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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 -
I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The 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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
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 -
What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion
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 -
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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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?
MARQUIS DE SADE