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 SADEThe more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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 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 -
There 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.
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What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.
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 -
The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him.
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In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
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So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.
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!
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So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .
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What do I see there but a frail being forever unable to bring man to heel and force him to bend a knee. This creature, although emanated from him, dominates him, knows how to offend him and thereby merit torments eternally! What a weak fellow, this God!
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Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
MARQUIS DE SADE






