In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
MARQUIS DE SADEIf Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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We monsters are necessary to nature also.
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Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.
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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!
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And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
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I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.
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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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Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.
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Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
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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.
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My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.
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Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.
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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.
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There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.
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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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Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?
MARQUIS DE SADE