Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Marquis de Sade (French Writer)

Marquis de Sade (1740–1814,) byname of Donatien-Alphonse-François, Comte de Sade, was a French aristocrat renowned for his extravagant lifestyle and exploration of extreme sexual and violent fantasies through his writings. He is best known for his unconventional preferences and erotic literature, ultimately leading to the term “sadism.”

Born into a prominent family in Paris, De Sade received a prestigious education, but he developed a deep fascination with the darker aspects of human nature. He engaged in numerous sexual escapades, often involving non-consensual acts, which resulted in his first imprisonment in 1777. Throughout his life, he faced confinement in various prisons and mental asylums due to societal judgment of his perceived moral transgressions.

During his time behind bars, De Sade devoted himself to writing extensively. His literary works encompassed novels, plays, and essays that portrayed explicit and sadistic sexual encounters, challenging prevailing societal norms and conventional morality. Among his most renowned novels are Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1787,) The 120 Days of Sodom (1785,) Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795,) and Justine and Juliette (1797.)

De Sade’s writings and his philosophy, known as Sadeism, delved into the boundaries of desire, power, and violence. He advocated for the absolute freedom of individual desires, unrestricted by moral or legal constraints. His controversial ideas and explicit works made him a lightning rod for criticism and condemnation, leading to the banning of his writings for many years. Nevertheless, his works continue to captivate and stimulate discussions regarding the nature of human desire, morality, and the boundaries of artistic expression.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Marquis de Sade

Religions are the cradles of despotism.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Religion

One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Violence

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

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

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: Kindness, Compassion

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

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

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost—the most legitimate—passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Criminals, Crime

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 majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Fame

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

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

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Mankind, Body, Man, One liners

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

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

Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Creation

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Atheism

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

They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Passion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
—Marquis de Sade

Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends… with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Virtue, Vice

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
—Marquis de Sade
Topics: Law, Lawyers

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