Marquis de Sade

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political…

— 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…

— Marquis de Sade

“It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure”

— Marquis de Sade

Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.

— Marquis de Sade

If the objects who serve us feel ecstacy, they are much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own…

— Marquis de Sade

“Imperious, angry, furious, extreme in all things, with a disturbance in the moral imagination unlike any the world has ever known -…

— Marquis de Sade

“Believe me, Eugenie, the words "vice" and "virtue" supply us only with local meanings. There is no action, however bizarre you may…

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

“In completing your civilization, the causes changed, but you maintained the custom: no longer did you sacrifice victims to gods athirst for…

— Marquis de Sade

Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.

— Marquis de Sade

If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that…

— Marquis de Sade

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

— Marquis de Sade

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others…

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

Woman's destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her.

— Marquis De Sade

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

— Marquis de Sade

Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.

— Marquis de Sade

“The past encourages me, the present electrifies me, and I have little fear for the future; and my hope is that the…

— Marquis de Sade

T requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.

— 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…

— Marquis de Sade

“From an early age I set myself above the monstrous fantasies of religion, being perfectly convinced that the existence of the creator…

— Marquis de Sade

There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those…

— Marquis de Sade

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.

— Marquis de Sade

“Let us remember that, despite the tasteless fables in the Holy Writ -- Sodom and Gomorrah, for example -- Nature does not…

— Marquis de Sade

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

— Marquis de Sade