Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
MARQUIS DE SADEAll men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of those principles; according to which never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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Sensual excess drives out pity in man.
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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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It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates.
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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?
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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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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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God strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me.
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The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
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It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
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Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.
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It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns
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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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Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.
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Evil is… a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world
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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.
MARQUIS DE SADE






