Marquis de Sade Quotes
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The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime - for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.
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Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.
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Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
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The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.
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Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?
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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
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Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
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It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no.
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Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?
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The 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.
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Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.
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Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.
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There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
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Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.
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Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.
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There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.
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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.
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God strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me.
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What do I see in the God of that infamous sect if not an inconsistent and barbarous being, today the creator of a world of destruction he repents of tomorrow; what do I see there but a frail being forever unable to bring man to heel and force him to bend a knee. This creature, although emanated from him, dominates him, knows how to offend him and thereby merit torments eternally! What a weak fellow, this God!
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Man's natural character is to imitate; that of the sensitive man is to resemble as closely as possible the person whom he loves. It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.
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One must feel sorry for those who have strange tastes, but never insult them. Their wrong is Nature's too; they are no more responsible for having come into the world with tendencies unlike ours than are we for being born bandy-legged or well-proportioned.
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What you call disorder is nothing else than one of the laws of the order you comprehend not and which you have erroneously named disorder because its effects, though good for Nature, run counter to your convenience or jar your opinions.
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Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
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How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!
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The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
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To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
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The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
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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 to suit other people! My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I'd not do so.
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Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.
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You are afraid of the people unrestrained-how ridiculous!
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