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
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 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
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.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Imitation
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
Topics: Anger
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
Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for, if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Lawyers, Law
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
Religions are the cradles of despotism.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Religion
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
Hope is the most sensitive part of a poor wretch’s soul; whoever raises it only to torment him is behaving like the executioners in Hell who, they say, incessantly renew old wounds and concentrate their attention on that area of it that is already lacerated.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Hope
Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Creation
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
Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Mankind, One liners, Man, Body
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
Topics: Imagination
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: Philosophy, Philosophers
The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Fame
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
Topics: Slavery
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
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
Topics: Imagination
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
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
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
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
Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Nature
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: Criminals, Crime
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Punishment
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
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
The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.
—Marquis de Sade
No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.
—Marquis de Sade
Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear—those are the twin bases of every religion.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Principles
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
Topics: Evil, Wickedness
They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Passion
One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Violence
If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finish, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Death, Dying
The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Faults, Mistakes
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
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
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
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