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 SADEThe horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.
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Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.
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Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.
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Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
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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.
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So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .
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What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
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The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion
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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.
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Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses . . .
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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.
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Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.
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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?
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The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
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Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it’s the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband’s mood.
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It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
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There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.
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Sensual excess drives out pity in man.
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Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.
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My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I’d not do so.
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We monsters are necessary to nature also.
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It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.
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In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.
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How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us.
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All universal moral principles are idle fancies.
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Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man’s imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices.
MARQUIS DE SADE