In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
MARQUIS DE SADEWhat crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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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Wolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong.
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Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
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I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
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In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.
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Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.
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Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
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What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep.
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Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.
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The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution.
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Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?
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According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.
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I’ve already told you: the only way to a woman’s heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.
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The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
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Hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.
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Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses . . .
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We monsters are necessary to nature also.
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Can we become other than what we are?
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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.
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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.
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If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws.
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What do I see in the God of that infamous sect if not an inconsistent and barbarous being, today the creator of a world of destruction he repents of tomorrow.
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My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!
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Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime?
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The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
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All universal moral principles are idle fancies.
MARQUIS DE SADE