De Sade Quotes

Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries. ~ Marquis De Sade

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. ~ Marquis De Sade

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. ~ Marquis De Sade

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil? ~ Marquis De Sade

If they who are appointed to instruct and rule over men had wisdom and virtue themselves, realities, and not fantasies, would enable them to govern better; but scoundrels, quacksalvers, ambitious ruffians, or low sneaks, the lawgivers have ever found it easier to lull nations to sleep with bedtime tales than to teach truths to the public, than to develop intelligence in the population, than to encourage men to virtue by making it worthwhile for sound and palpable reasons, than, in short, to govern them in a logical manner. ~ Marquis De Sade

…the expression "beyond good and evil" is all too easily (mis)understood. When we say of someone that he is acting as if he were "beyond good and evil," we usually mean that, to put it plainly, he doesn't give a damn about the good. The expression "beyond good and evil," which has become a kind of ritornello, is typically misused - that is to say, it is used to refer to what would be more correctly referred to as "beyond good." In other words, it is employed to describe a space where, although the good is no longer taken into consideration, the evil and fascination with evil are still very much at work. In this context (and if we follow Lacan's thinking to its logical conclusion), even the scandalous Marquis de Sade got no further than merely transgressing the good. In de Sade's literature, the victims not only remain beautiful throughout the horror to which they are subjected, but even gain in beauty during this process: right up to the end, a sublime beauty "covers" the bodies of the victims, even in their naked exposure. Lacan's point is that there are walls and defences that humanity has erected as shields against the central field of das Ding (connoted as evil): the first protective barrier is the good; the second is the beautiful or sublime. This is where the intimate link between sublime beauty and evil (or danger) originally springs from. Nietzsche himself develops the idea that, by transgressing (or being indifferent to) the good, we enter the domain of the sublime, ~ Alenka Zupančič

Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace ~ Marquis De Sade

Before you were born, you were nothing more than an indistinguishable lump of unformed matter. After death, you simply will return to that nebulous state. You are going to become the raw material out of which new beings will be fashioned. Will there be pain in this natural process? No! Pleasure? No! Now, is there anything frightening in this? Certainly not! And yet, people sacrifice pleasure on earth in the hope that pain will be avoided in an after-life. The fools don't realize that, after death, pain and pleasure cannot exist: there is only the sensationless state of cosmic anonymity: therefore, the rule of life should be ... to enjoy oneself! ~ Marquis De Sade

The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable. ~ Marquis De Sade

Any enjoyment is weakened when shared. ~ 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

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! ~ Marquis De Sade

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep, when I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt. ~ Marquis De Sade

The imagination serves us only when the mind is absolutely free of any prejudice. A single prejudice suffices to cool off the imagination. This whimsical part of the mind is so unbridled as to be uncontrollable. Its greatest triumphs, its most eminent delights consist in smashing all the restraints that oppose it. Imagination is the enemy of all norms, the idolater of all disorder and of all that bears the color of crime. ~ Marquis De Sade

Respectable?...Not another word, my dear, for I assure you of all the sentiments I should like to inspire respect is the very last: love is what I wish to arouse. Respect! I am not yet old enough for respect. ~ 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

There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them. ~ 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. My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being,the way I am made. I do not contradict them, and would not even if I wished to. For my system, which you disapprove of is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness -it means more to me than my life itself. ~ Marquis De Sade

Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply. ~ Marquis De Sade

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. ~ Marquis De Sade

But to declare his wishes only in some unknown corner of Asia, to choose the most double-dealing and the most superstitious of peoples as followers, and the vilest, most ridiculous, and most roguish working man as representative, to muddle up the message so much that it is impossible to comprehend, to teach it only to a tiny number of individuals while leaving everyone else in the dark, and to punish them for remaining there ... Oh, no, Therese, no, no, such atrocities cannot be our guide. I would rather die a thousand times than believe in them. When atheism wants martyrs, let it choose them and my blood is ready. ~ Marquis De Sade

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination. ~ Marquis De Sade

De Sade says you must commit crimes. In using the word crime we're adopting the consensus term, though among ourselves we would not describe any of our actions as such. We need the universally valid norm to get a kick out of our own extremeness. We are monsters, even if we disguise ourselves as ordinary people. We are the children of ordinary people, but we are not content with that. Inwardly we are consumed with wickedness, outwardly we are grammar school pupils. ~ Elfriede Jelinek

The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here. ~ Paulo Coelho

It is only by sacrificing everything to sensual pleasure that this being known as Man, cast into the world in spite of himself, may succeed in sowing a few roses on the thorns of life. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

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. ~ Marquis De Sade

Thus, that happiness the two sexes cannot find with the other they will find, one in blind obedience, the other in the most energetic expression of his domination. ~ Marquis De Sade

Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff? ~ Marquis De Sade

I suggest somewhere that anyone who wishes to write and has no aptitude for it would be better off making shoes for ladies and boots for men. ~ Marquis De Sade

I despise Wednesdays! They are the Marquis de Sade of the work week. Wednesday are so awful that...wait..what? It's Thurs? (face-palm) ~ L.G.A. McIntyre

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed? ~ Marquis De Sade

Oh! What an enigma is man!" exclaimed the Duke. "Yes, my friend," said Curval. "That is why a certain very intelligent gentleman once said it was better to fuck him than to understand him. ~ Marquis De Sade

Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, in order that the spot become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men save nevertheless for those few who in their goodness have loved me until the last and of whom I carry away a sweet remembrance with me to the grave.
Last Will and Testament (1806) ~ Marquis De Sade

A perversion must be baptized and patronized (the Marquis De Sade and Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch were on to something). ~ Philippe Lejeune

Let us remember that, despite the tasteless fables in the Holy Writ -- Sodom and Gomorrah, for example -- Nature does not have two voices; She does not create the appetite for buggery, then proscribe its practice. This fallacious proscription is the work of those imbeciles who seem unable to view sex as anything but an instrumentality for the multiplication of their own imbecilic kind. But I put it to you thusly: would it not be unreasonable for Nature, if she opposed buggery, to reward its practitioners with consummate pleasure at the very moment when they, by buggering, heap insults upon Her "natural" order? Furthermore, if procreation were the primary purpose of sex, would woman be created capable of conceiving during only sixteen to eighteen hours of each month -- and thus, all arithmetic being performed, during only four to six years of her total life span? No, child, let us not ascribe to Nature those prohibitions which we acquire through fear or prejudice; all things which are possible are natural; let no one ever persuade you otherwise. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves; all 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. ~ Marquis De Sade

The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against 'God' - De Sade, Byron's "Manfred", Schiller's "Robbers", Goethe's "Faust", Hoffmann's mad geniuses - are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the 'spirits' decided to make a planned and consistent effort at 'communication'? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself. ~ Colin Wilson

life is a bitch so enjoy it ;p ~ Marquis De Sade

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

...the good never suspect others of perpetrating wicked deeds which they themselves are incapable of committing. That is why they are so easily duped by the first rogue who sinks his claws into them, and why it is so easy and so despicable to trick them. ~ Marquis De Sade

The laws vainly try to talk virtue to the mass, but it's just talk. The people who make the laws are really too biased towards evil and never carry out their fine talk -- they merely make a stab at it for the sake of appearances, that's all. ~ Marquis De Sade

Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions. ~ Richard Seaver

To lie is always a necessity for women; above all when they choose to deceive, falsehood becomes vital to them. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it's the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband's mood. ~ Marquis De Sade

My books - I kid you not - are very often shelved between DeLillo and de Sade. Which not only completely cracks me up, but it seems like an encouraging message from the universe: between those two, there's a lot of wiggle room. I feel just fine there. ~ Stacey D'Erasmo

...those who deny or oppose these so pleasant delights (of virtue), do so only from jealousy, you may be sure, from the barbarous pleasure of making others as guilty and unhappy as they are. They are blind and would like everyone to be the same, they are mistaken, and would like everyone else to be mistaken; but if you could see into the depths of their hearts you would find only sorrow and repentance; all these apostles of crime are only evil and desperate people; you would not find a sincere person among them who would not admit, if he were truthful, that their poisonous words or dangerous writings had not been guided only by their passions. And what man in fact can say in cold blood that the bases of morality can be shaken without risk? What being would dare maintain that doing good and desiring good are not essentially the aim of mankind? And how can a man who will do only evil expect to be happy in a society whose strongest concern is the perpetual increase of good? But will not this apologist of crime not shudder himself when he had uprooted from all hearts the only thing which could lead to his conversion? What will stop his servants ruining him, if they have ceased to be virtuous? ~ Marquis De Sade

But the man who, by dint of long study and sober reflection, has succeeded in training his mind not to detect evil in anything, to consider all human actions with the utmost indifference, to regard them all as the inevitable consequences of a power - however it's defined - which is sometimes good and sometimes perverse but always irresistible, and gives rise to both what men approve and to what they condemn and never allows anything to distract or thwart its operations, such a man, I say, as you will agree, sir, may be as happy behaving as I behave as you are in the career which you follow. Happiness is an abstraction, a product of the imagination. It is one manner of being moved and depends exclusively on our way of seeing and feeling. Apart from the satisfaction of our needs, there is no single thing which makes all men happy. Every day we observe one man made happy by the circumstance which makes his neighbour supremely miserable. There is therefore nothing which guarantees happiness. It can only exist for us in the form given to it by our physical constitution and our philosophical principles. [...] Nothing in the world is real, nothing which merits praise or blame, nothing deserving reward or punishment, nothing which is unlawful here and perfectly legal five hundred leagues away, in other words, there is no unchanging, universal good. ~ Marquis De Sade

When a man loves a woman, as our old troubadours used to say, even if he has heard or seen something that puts his beloved in a bad light, he should believe neither his ears nor his eyes, he should listen to his heart alone. ~ Marquis De Sade

Mme de Franval, indulgent and sweet-natured as ever, and always happy when anything brought her closer to a man who was dearer to her than her own life, went along with all the desires of that treacherous husband, anticipated them, served them, and shared them without exception, not daring to make the most of the moment, as she should have done, to persuade that barbarian to treat her better, and not plunge his unhappy wife every day into an abyss of pain and suffering. ~ Marquis De Sade

He who perpetrates an outrage may well be quick to forget what he has done. But they who have suffered at his hands are justified at least in remembering the wrongs he has done them. ~ Marquis De Sade

It's ludicrous to even talk about (Marquis) de Sade, let alone indulge in all that, when people are being tortured and suffering for real, not for sexual games. I have no interest either in being a victim or in turning others into victims. ~ Francoise Gilot

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. ~ Marquis De Sade

Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates. ~ Marquis De Sade

When we die, we die. No more. Once the spider-thread of life is severed, the human body is but a mass of corrupting vegetable matter. A feast for worms. That is all. Tell me, what is more ridiculous than the notion of an immortal soul; than the belief that when a man is dead, he remains alive, that when his life grinds to a halt, his soul
or whatever you call it
takes flight? ~ 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 human blood, but to laws, which you deem sage because you found in them a specious reason to indulge your former habits, together with the semblance of a justice which was, at bottom, nothing other than the desire to preserve those horrid practices which you could not abjure. ~ Marquis De Sade

...it is only in the darkness of the grave that man will find the peace which the wickedness of his fellows, the tumult of his own passions, and, above all, the inevitability of his fate shall eternally deny him in this life. ~ Marquis De Sade

Those who have no principles are never more dangerous than when they reach the age when they lose all sense of shame. Their hearts are gangrened by depravity, they refine and polish up their first offences and convert them into heinous crimes while still believing they are still at the stage of minor misdemeanours. ~ Marquis De Sade

I wished to stifle the unhappy passion which burned in my soul; but is love an illness to be cured? All I endeavored to oppose to it merely fanned its flames. ~ Marquis De Sade

All universal moral principles are idle fancies. ~ Marquis De Sade

There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally. ~ 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 picture it, that is truly criminal; or one that can really be called virtuous. Everything depends on our customs and on the climates we live in. What is considered a crime here is often a virtue a few hundred leagues away; and the virtues of another hemisphere might, quite conversely, be regarded as crimes among us. There is no atrocity that hasn't been deified, no virtue that hasn't been stigmatized. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public. ~ Marquis De Sade

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated. ~ 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 his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it's own reward? ~ 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 is a revolting absurdity in which not even children believe any more; there is no need for me to restrain my tastes in order to please Him, it is from Nature that I received these tastes, and I should offend her by resisting them – if they are wicked, it is because they serve her purposes. In her hands I am nothing but a machine for her to operate as she wishes, and there is not a single one of my crimes that fails to serve her; the greater her need, the more she spurs me on – I should be a fool to resist her. Only the law stands in my way, but I defy it – my gold and my influence place me beyond the reach of those crude scales meant only for the common people. ~ Marquis De Sade

Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength. ~ Marquis De Sade

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

It has been estimated that more than 50 million individuals have lost their lives to wars and religious massacres. Is there even one among them worth the blood of a single bird? ~ Marquis De Sade

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know. ~ Marquis De Sade

I am about to put foward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content. ~ Marquis De Sade

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all; ~ Marquis De Sade

It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure ~ Marquis De Sade

If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finish, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another. ~ Marquis De Sade

Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I'd say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel. ~ Marquis De Sade

When she's abandoned her moral center and teachings ... when she's cast aside her facade of propriety and lady-like demeanor ... when I have so corrupted this fragile thing and brought out a writhing, mewling, bucking, wanton whore for my enjoyment and pleasure ... enticing from within this feral lioness ... growling and scratching and biting ... taking everything I dish out to her ... at that moment she is never more beautiful to me. ~ Marquis De Sade

I'm afraid, ha, ha, I find more inspiration in the Marquis de Sade. ~ Christopher Isherwood

What is more immoral than war? ~ Marquis De Sade

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. ~ Marquis De Sade

If, though full of respect for social conventions and never overstepping the bounds they draw round us, if, nonetheless, it should come to pass that the wicked tread upon flowers, will it not be decided that it is preferable to abandon oneself to the tide rather than to resist it? Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others? ~ Marquis De Sade

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

Those who are unhappy
clutch at shadows, and to
give themselves an enjoyment
that truth refuses them, they
artfully bring into being all
sorts of illusions. ~ Marquis De Sade

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship. ~ Marquis De Sade

Remorse! Can a heart like mine ever know the meaning of such a feeling? The habit of evildoing expunged it long ago from my calloused soul. ~ Marquis De Sade

Few men had been as cavalier and as debauched as the Président, but completely jaded, utterly torpid, all he was left with now was the depravity and turpitude of libertinage. ~ Marquis De Sade

A little less vice is virtuousness in a very vicious heart ~ Marquis De Sade

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

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

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

Sure, we'd faced some things as children that a lot of kids don't. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind - gradutaing, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expecations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.

And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet wi ~ Jim Butcher

Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires. ~ Marquis De Sade

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice! ~ Marquis De Sade

Is it true that in Petersburg you belonged to some secret society of bestial sensualists? Is it true that you could give lessons to the Marquis De Sade? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will. Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race. What crimes would have been spared the world, if they had choked the first imbecile who thought of speaking of you. ~ Marquis De Sade