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?
MARQUIS DE SADEHappiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Religions are the cradles of despotism.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
What is more immoral than war?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion
MARQUIS DE SADE -
And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted,
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 -
The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
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 -
Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.
MARQUIS DE SADE