Marquis De Sade Quotes

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy...Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

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.

Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.

One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

There 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.

If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.

Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.

Can we become other than what we are?

No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.

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.

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.

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.

Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.

And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?

Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Love Is Stronger Than Pride

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.

Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.

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.

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

Now I beg of you to tell me whether I must love a human being simply because he exists or resembles me and whether for those reasons alone I must suddenly prefer him to myself?

Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.

God strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me.

Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization.

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

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?

There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.

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.

I've been to Hell. You've only read about it.

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.

The primary and most beautiful of nature's qualities is motion

Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.