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 SADEDo not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?
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 -
All men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of those principles; according to which never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking to suit other people!
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.
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