Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
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.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
For my system, which you disapprove of is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness -it means more to me than my life itself.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Thread of their days without pity, and in the midst of life, without ever concerning themselves with this fatal moment, living as though they were to exist for ever, they disappear into the obscure cloud of immortality, uncertain of the fate which lies in store for them.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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!
MARQUIS DE SADE -
You 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 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 -
Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.
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The 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 SADE -
Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Never 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 SADE