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 SADEThe 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.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!
MARQUIS DE SADE -
The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages.
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 -
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?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere is a fool.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
God strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me.
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 -
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?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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 -
Can we become other than what we are?
MARQUIS DE SADE