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 SADECruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being,the way I am made. I do not contradict them, and would not even if I wished to.
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 -
Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
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 -
Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I’d not do so.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.
MARQUIS DE SADE






