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 SADENothing 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 SADEThe degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him.
MARQUIS DE SADEThe 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 SADENow 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 SADEReturn to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race.
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.
MARQUIS DE SADEIf 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 SADEAccording to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.
MARQUIS DE SADEThe horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
MARQUIS DE SADENever may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves.
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 idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
MARQUIS DE SADEYou say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere is a fool.
MARQUIS DE SADEReligions are the cradles of despotism.
MARQUIS DE SADEGood 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 SADEFear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.
MARQUIS DE SADE