Marquis de Sade Short Quotes

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Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
All men are fools: to escape seeing one, one would be compelled to shut himself in his room, and break his mirror.

Marquis de Sade
Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

Marquis de Sade
The ultimate triumph of philosophy would be to cast light upon the mysterious ways in which Providence moves to achieve the designs it has for man.

Marquis de Sade
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.

Marquis de Sade
... there is a sum of evil equal to the sum of good, the continuing equilibrium of the world requires that there be as many good people as wicked people...

Marquis de Sade
Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.

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
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
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.

Marquis de Sade
Lewd women, let the voluptuous Saint-Ange be your model; after her example, be heedless of all that contradicts pleasure's divine laws, by which all her life she was enchained.

Marquis de Sade
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?

Marquis de Sade
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.

Marquis de Sade
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.

Marquis de Sade