Never 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 SADENature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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 -
Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
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 -
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 -
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 -
Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it’s the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband’s mood.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Now 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 SADE -
In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Can we become other than what we are?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?
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 -
If the objects who serve us feel ecstacy, they are much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired.
MARQUIS DE SADE






