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 SADEIn libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
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I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.
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There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.
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Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
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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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Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.
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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.
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Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!
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If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws.
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The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.
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How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!
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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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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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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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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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