What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.
MARQUIS DE SADEWhat crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.
MARQUIS DE SADEOne 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 SADEThe 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.
MARQUIS DE SADEThere is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
MARQUIS DE SADEWolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong.
MARQUIS DE SADEHere am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!
MARQUIS DE SADEWhat we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
MARQUIS DE SADEIt requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
MARQUIS DE SADEThat everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you…every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.
MARQUIS DE SADENever 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 SADEI write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade…
MARQUIS DE SADEThe man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
MARQUIS DE SADECruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
MARQUIS DE SADEThere 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 SADEBehold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy!
MARQUIS DE SADEMy 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