The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution.
MARQUIS DE SADEMurder 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?
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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What do I see in the God of that infamous sect if not an inconsistent and barbarous being, today the creator of a world of destruction he repents of tomorrow.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 SADE -
Now I beg of you to tell me whether I must love a human being simply because he exists or resembles me and whether for those reasons alone I must suddenly prefer him to myself?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
All men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of those principles; according to which never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other.
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 -
Sensual excess drives out pity in man.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
All universal moral principles are idle fancies.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
If the objects who serve us feel ecstacy, they are much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired.
MARQUIS DE SADE






