Marquis De Sade Quotes

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.

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!

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

It is only by way of pain one arrives at pleasure

Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?

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.

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.

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

When I started writing I was a sick teenaged fuck inside who partly thought I was the new Marquis de Sade, a body doomed to communicate with Satan who was us- ing my sickness as his home away from home, and there’s your proof.

The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.

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.

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.

Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain

Sex without pain is like food without taste

When she's abandoned her moral center and teachings...when she's cast aside her facade of propriety and lady-like demeanor...when I have so corrupted this fragile thing and brought out a writhing, mewling, bucking, wanton whore for my enjoyment and pleasure.....enticing from within this feral lioness...growling and scratching and biting...taking everything I dish out to her.....at that moment she is never more beautiful to me.

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

I want to be the victim of his errors.

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

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

The only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment.

It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

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.

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

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

The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here.

I don't know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the mind's frailties.

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.

Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates.

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns

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.

True happiness lies in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.

Can we become other than what we are?

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

What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.

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.

You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere 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.

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.

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.

Nothing quite encourages as does one's first unpunished crime.

In order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.

Julian was the son of Diokles of Sparta, also known as Diokles the Butcher. That man made the Marquis de Sade look like Ronald McDonald. (Ben)

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?

The past encourages me, the present electrifies me, and I have little fear for the future; and my hope is that the rest of my life shall by far surpass the extravagances of my youth.

Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

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!

We're all free and equal to die like dogs

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all;

I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.

Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust.

I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin. "That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously.

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.

...Madame, I have become a whore through good-will and libertine through virtue.

Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race I hate Nature this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face that can bear everything this goads us to greater and greater acts

A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.

Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.

It is only by sacrificing everything to sensual pleasure that this being known as Man, cast into the world in spite of himself, may succeed in sowing a few roses on the thorns of life.

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?

...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...

My vengeance needs blood.

I wished to stifle the unhappy passion which burned in my soul; but is love an illness to be cured? All I endeavored to oppose to it merely fanned its flames.

Those who are unhappy clutch at shadows, and to give themselves an enjoyment that truth refuses them, they artfully bring into being all sorts of illusions.

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.

Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.

Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness.

I would, thank God, watch the universe perish without shedding a tear.

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

Oh! my friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think...

Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me

The greatest pleasures are born of conquered repugnancies.

What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.

When a man loves a woman, as our old troubadours used to say, even if he has heard or seen something that puts his beloved in a bad light, he should believe neither his ears nor his eyes, he should listen to his heart alone.

Before you were born, you were nothing more than an indistinguishable lump of unformed matter. After death, you simply will return to that nebulous state. You are going to become the raw material out of which new beings will be fashioned. Will there be pain in this natural process? No! Pleasure? No! Now, is there anything frightening in this? Certainly not! And yet, people sacrifice pleasure on earth in the hope that pain will be avoided in an after-life. The fools don't realize that, after death, pain and pleasure cannot exist: there is only the sensationless state of cosmic anonymity: therefore, the rule of life should be ... to enjoy oneself!

It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.

Imperious, angry, furious, extreme in all things, with a disturbance in the moral imagination unlike any the world has ever known - there you have me in a nutshell: and one more thing, kill me or take me as I am, for I will not change

Once and for all the idea of glorious victories won by the glorious army must be wiped out Neither side is glorious On either side they're just frightened men messing their pants and they all want the same thing Not to lie under the earth but to walk upon it without crutches (Roux, act 1, scene 19)

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.

Long ago I left heroics to the heroes

The reasoning man who rejects the superstitions of simpletons necessarily becomes their enemy; he must expect as much and be prepared to laugh at the consequences.

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep, when I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.

...and above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. There are other trades which you can take up: make boots, not books.

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.

If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it's own reward?

this is what happens to the plans of humans, it is when they make them in the midst of their pleasures that death cuts the thread of their days without pity, and in the midst of life, without ever concerning themselves with this fatal moment, living as though they were to exist for ever, they disappear into the obscure cloud of immortality, uncertain of the fate which lies in store for them.

Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren't about sex but politics. They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against.

Believe me, Eugenie, the words "vice" and "virtue" supply us only with local meanings. There is no action, however bizarre you may picture it, that is truly criminal; or one that can really be called virtuous. Everything depends on our customs and on the climates we live in. What is considered a crime here is often a virtue a few hundred leagues away; and the virtues of another hemisphere might, quite conversely, be regarded as crimes among us. There is no atrocity that hasn't been deified, no virtue that hasn't been stigmatized.

There are no more than two or three crimes to commit in the world,’ said Curval. ‘Once those are done there is no more to be said – what remains is inferior and one no longer feels a thing. How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze – those would be crimes indeed, and not the little excesses in which we indulge, which do no more than metamorphose, in the course of a year, a dozen creatures into clods of earth.

I also remember being struck by de Sade's will, in which he asked that his ashes be scattered to the four corners of the earth in the hope that humankind would forget both his writings and his name. I'd like to be able to make that demand; commemorative ceremonies are not only false but dangerous, as are all statues of famous men. Long live forgetfulness, I've always said—the only dignity I see is in oblivion.

When we die, we die. No more. Once the spider-thread of life is severed, the human body is but a mass of corrupting vegetable matter. A feast for worms. That is all. Tell me, what is more ridiculous than the notion of an immortal soul; than the belief that when a man is dead, he remains alive, that when his life grinds to a halt, his soul -- or whatever you call it -- takes flight?

The imagination serves us only when the mind is absolutely free of any prejudice. A single prejudice suffices to cool off the imagination. This whimsical part of the mind is so unbridled as to be uncontrollable. Its greatest triumphs, its most eminent delights consist in smashing all the restraints that oppose it. Imagination is the enemy of all norms, the idolater of all disorder and of all that bears the color of crime.

The ditch once covered over, above it acorns shall be strewn, in order that the spot become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, the traces of my grave may disappear from the face of the earth as I trust the memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men save nevertheless for those few who in their goodness have loved me until the last and of whom I carry away a sweet remembrance with me to the grave." Last Will and Testament (1806)

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.

Let us remember that, despite the tasteless fables in the Holy Writ -- Sodom and Gomorrah, for example -- Nature does not have two voices; She does not create the appetite for buggery, then proscribe its practice. This fallacious proscription is the work of those imbeciles who seem unable to view sex as anything but an instrumentality for the multiplication of their own imbecilic kind. But I put it to you thusly: would it not be unreasonable for Nature, if she opposed buggery, to reward its practitioners with consummate pleasure at the very moment when they, by buggering, heap insults upon Her "natural" order? Furthermore, if procreation were the primary purpose of sex, would woman be created capable of conceiving during only sixteen to eighteen hours of each month -- and thus, all arithmetic being performed, during only four to six years of her total life span? No, child, let us not ascribe to Nature those prohibitions which we acquire through fear or prejudice; all things which are possible are natural; let no one ever persuade you otherwise.

Having proven that solitary pleasures are as delicious as any others and much more likely to delight, it becomes perfectly clear that this enjoyment, taken in independence of the objectwe employ, is not merely of a nature very remote from what could be pleasurable to thatobject, but is even found to be inimical to that object’s pleasure: what is more, it may becomean imposed suffering, a vexation, or a torture, and the only thing that results from this abuse isa very certain increase of pleasure for the despot who does the tormenting or vexing; let usattempt to demonstrate this.”Voluptuous emotion is nothing but a kind of vibration produced in our soul by shockswhich the imagination, inflamed by the remembrance of a lubricious object, registers uponour senses, either through this object’s presence, or better still by this object’s being exposedto that particular kind of irritation which most profoundly stirs us; thus, our voluptuoustransport Ä this indescribable convulsive needling which drives us wild, which lifts us to thehighest pitch of happiness at which man is able to arrive Ä is never ignited save by twocauses: either by the perception in the object we use of a real or imaginary beauty, the beautyin which we delight the most, or by the sight of that object undergoing the strongest possiblesensation; now, there is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certainand dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign andalmost never experience; and, furthermore, how much self-confidence, youth, vigor, healthare not needed in order to be sure of producing this dubious and hardly very satisfyingimpression of pleasure in a woman. To produce the painful impression, on the contrary,requires no virtues at all: the more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable,the more resounding his success. With what regards the objective, it will be far more certainlyattained since we are establishing the fact that one never better touches, I wish to say, that onenever better irritates one’s senses than when the greatest possible impression has been produced in the employed object, by no matter what devices; therefore, he who will cause themost tumultuous impression to be born in a woman, he who will most thoroughly convulsethis woman’s entire frame, very decidedly will have managed to procure himself the heaviest possible dose of voluptuousness, because the shock resultant upon us by the impressionsothers experience, which shock in turn is necessitated by the impression we have of thoseothers, will necessarily be more vigorous if the impression these others receive be painful,than if the impression they receive be sweet and mild; and it follows that the voluptuousegoist, who is persuaded his pleasures will be keen only insofar as they are entire, willtherefore impose, when he has it in his power to do so, the strongest possible dose of painupon the employed object, fully certain that what by way of voluptuous pleasure he extractswill be his only by dint of the very lively impression he has produced.