Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.
MARQUIS DE SADEBeauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Here 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 SADE -
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 SADE -
The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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.
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 -
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 -
Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
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 -
Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Sex without pain is like food without taste
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 -
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 -
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 -
Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
When I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy!
MARQUIS DE SADE