The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
MARQUIS DE SADEThere is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!
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 -
Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade…
MARQUIS DE SADE -
What is more immoral than war?
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 -
I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
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