So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .
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.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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Your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments.
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The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.
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To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
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What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
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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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It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns
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.
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All universal moral principles are idle fancies.
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For my system, which you disapprove of is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness -it means more to me than my life itself.
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According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.
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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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There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.
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Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.
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Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?
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What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act?
MARQUIS DE SADE