Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French nobleman, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. In his lifetime some of these were published under his own name while others, which de Sade denied having written, appeared anonymously. These Marquis de Sade quotes will motivate you.
Best Marquis de Sade Quotes
- “Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.” ~ 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
- “It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “We monsters are necessary to nature also.” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.” ~ 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
- “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.” ~ 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 others 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
- “How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.” ~ 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
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“Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Can we become other than what we are?” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments; hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.” ~ 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
- “The debility to which Nature condemned women incontestably proves that her design is for man, who then more than ever enjoys his strength, to exercise it in all the violent forms that suit him best, by means of tortures, if he be so inclined, or worse.” ~ 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 of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you…every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.” ~ 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
- “Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“All universal moral principles are idle fancies.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . 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
- “Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates. Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“Love Is Stronger Than Pride” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?” ~ 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
- “Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “What is more immoral than war?” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.” ~ 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
- “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
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“The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Religions are the cradles of despotism.” ~ 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
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“Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on 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 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.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Wolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong: there you have Nature, there you have her intentions, there you have her scheme: a perpetual action and reaction, a host of vices, a host of virtues, in one word, a perfect equilibrium resulting from the equality of good and evil on earth.” ~ 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 enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.” ~ Marquis de Sade
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“Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.” ~ Marquis de Sade Quotes
- “Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.” ~ 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
- “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
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“Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.” ~ Marquis de Sade
- “In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution… even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.” ~ 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 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
- “One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.” ~ Marquis de Sade
