Laura De Sade Quotes

She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying
her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place.
It's folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying;
for death looked lovely in her face. ~ Francesco Petrarca

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

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

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

I want to be the victim of his errors. ~ Marquis De Sade

...only poetry, exempt from all practical applications, permits one to have at its disposal, to a certain extent, the brilliance and suffocation that Marquis de Sade tried so indecently to provoke.`
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004, p. 93 ~ Georges Bataille

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

Now let us consider theft. From the standpoint of the wealthy, this is, of course, an horrendous crime. But, laying partiality aside, let us ask ourselves as republicans: shall we, upholding the principle that all men are equal, brand as wrong an act whose effect is to accomplish a more equal distribution of wealth? Theft furthers economic equilibrium: one never hears of the rich stealing from the poor, thereby aggravating the economic imbalance; only of the poor stealing from the rich, thereby correcting it. What possibly be wrong with that? ~ Marquis De Sade

I should like to find a crime with perpetual repercussions, which would continue even after I had ceased to act, so there would not be a single instant of my life, not even when I was asleep, when I would not be causing some sort of disorder, a disorder so extensive as to involve general corruption, or so absolute a disturbance that its effect would be prolonged even when my life had ceased. ~ Marquis De Sade

Don't have children: they deform women's bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later. ~ Marquis De Sade

It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures. ~ 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

One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants. ~ 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 adopts a manner of thinking for others! ~ Marquis De Sade

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death. ~ Marquis De Sade

The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

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

But a wife ... "
" ... is an individual who can be interesting when one makes use of her, but one must know how to detach oneself firmly when serious reasons separate one from her."
"That is a harsh statement."
"Not at all ... it is philosophy ... it is the tone of the day, it is the language of reason, one must adopt it or be taken for a fool."
"This supposes some fault in your wife, explain it to me: some natural defect, or a failure to comply, or bad conduct."
"A little of everything ... a little of everything, sir, but let us change the subject, I beg you, and return to that dear Madam: damn me, I don't understand how you can have been in Orleans without amusing yourself with that creature ... but everyone has her. ~ Marquis De Sade

The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

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

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

Humane sentiments are baseless, mad, and improper; they are incredibly feeble; never do they withstand the gainsaying passions, never do they resist bare necessity. ~ Marquis De Sade

I've been to Hell. You've only read about it. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased...

[They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

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

The past encourages me, the present electrifies me, and I have little fear for the future; and my hope is that the rest of my life shall by far surpass the extravagances of my youth. ~ Marquis De Sade

The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

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

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

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

Madame, I have become a whore through good-will and libertine through virtue. ~ Marquis De Sade

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. ~ Marquis De Sade

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

It has pleased Nature so to make us that we attain happiness only by way of pain. ~ Marquis De Sade