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 SADENature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
-
-
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 -
So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .
MARQUIS DE SADE -
One 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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I’d say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Religions are the cradles of despotism.
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 -
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
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 -
What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act?
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 -
What is more immoral than war?
MARQUIS DE SADE