I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
MARQUIS DE SADEI have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
MARQUIS DE SADEThere are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.
MARQUIS DE SADEShe 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 SADEThere is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.
MARQUIS DE SADEIs it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
MARQUIS DE SADEHow delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us.
MARQUIS DE SADEEven those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.
MARQUIS DE SADECruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.
MARQUIS DE SADEWhat we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
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.
MARQUIS DE SADEDon’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.
MARQUIS DE SADENature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.
MARQUIS DE SADECertain 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 SADEThe degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him.
MARQUIS DE SADEReturn to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race.
MARQUIS DE SADEIt is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.
MARQUIS DE SADE