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 SADEWhat do I see there but a frail being forever unable to bring man to heel and force him to bend a knee. This creature, although emanated from him, dominates him, knows how to offend him and thereby merit torments eternally! What a weak fellow, this God!
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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 -
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?
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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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I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted,
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What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!
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Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy!
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Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.
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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!
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
She 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.
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Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
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If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?
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It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.
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If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.
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 -
The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution.
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Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
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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.
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Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.
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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.
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And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
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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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In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.
MARQUIS DE SADE