Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740–1814,) better known as the Marquis de Sade, was a French aristocrat, 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 were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously and Sade denied being their author. He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law. The words “sadism” and “sadist” are derived from his name.
Source: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Sex
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
Topics: Desires
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
Topics: Birth
Evil is a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Evil
The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Mistakes, Faults
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
Topics: Sex
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
Topics: Sex
Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Vision, Prophecy
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.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Crime, Criminals
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
Topics: Prejudice
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
Topics: Pain
For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there’s an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Hell
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
Topics: Happiness
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Atheism
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
Topics: Government
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
Topics: Tact
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
Topics: Government
Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Desires
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
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
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
Topics: Religion
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.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Compassion, Kindness
The primary and most beautiful of Nature’s qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times, but this motion is simply a perpetual consequence of crimes, she conserves it by means of crimes only.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Change
Ah, Eugenie, have done with virtues! Among the sacrifices that can be made to those counterfeit divinities, is there one worth an instant of the pleasures one tastes in outraging them?
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Virtue
Woman’s destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Women
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
Topics: Sympathy
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
Topics: Prejudice
The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Fame
The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Imagination
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
Topics: Marriage
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
Topics: Murder
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