110+ Marquis De Sade Quotes (Depraved, Transgressive And Subversive)

The French Novelist Marquis De Sade was a very controversial figure in the 18th century. He was known for his writing which focused on topics such as blasphemy, libertinism, and sadism. His works often challenged the moral and religious values of the time, and his writing earned him many enemies.

Top 10 Marquis De Sade Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.
4. 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.
5. Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
6. Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
7. In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.

Marquis De Sade Image Quotes

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice. — Marquis De Sade

Marquis De Sade Short Quotes

• Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.
• One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
• No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
• The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
• Religions are the cradles of despotism.
• And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?
• The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.
• Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
• There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
• We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Marquis De Sade Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it. Now I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy Him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Marquis De Sade

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

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

I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it. — Marquis De Sade

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

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

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

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

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

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

God strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me. — 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

Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist. — Marquis De Sade

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart! — Marquis De Sade

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. — Marquis De Sade

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

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

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

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

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? — Marquis De Sade

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

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 — 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

The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect. — Marquis De Sade

Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates. — Marquis De Sade

I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure. — Marquis De Sade

All universal moral principles are idle fancies. — Marquis De Sade

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. — Marquis De Sade

In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do. — Marquis De Sade

Sensual excess drives out pity in man. — Marquis De Sade

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

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship. — Marquis De Sade

Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders. — Marquis De Sade

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination. — Marquis De Sade

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

The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success. — Marquis De Sade

The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way. — Marquis De Sade

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

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death. — Marquis De Sade

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. — Marquis De Sade

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

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

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

Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise? — Marquis De Sade

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

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

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? — Marquis De Sade

Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust. — Marquis De Sade

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

What is more immoral than war? — Marquis De Sade

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

Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I'd say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel. — Marquis De Sade

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

Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers? — Marquis De Sade

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

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

It is certainly no crime to depict the bizarre ideas that nature inspires. — Marquis De Sade

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

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

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

The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions. — Marquis De Sade

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

Woman's destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her. — Marquis De Sade

Sex without pain is like food without taste — Marquis De Sade

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

Consider the problem from the point of view of evil, evil being almost always pleasure's true and major charm; considered thus, the crime must appear greater when perpetrated upon a being of your identical sort than when inflicted upon one which is not, and this once established, the delight automatically doubles. — Marquis De Sade

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

"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

It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures. — Marquis De Sade

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

One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants. — Marquis De Sade

Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands. — 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

The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all. — 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

Any enjoyment is weakened when shared. — Marquis De Sade

Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it? — Marquis De Sade

What you call disorder is nothing else than one of the laws of the order you comprehend not and which you have erroneously named disorder because its effects, though good for Nature, run counter to your convenience or jar your opinions. — Marquis De Sade

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

Life Lessons by Marquis De Sade

1. The Marquis De Sade teaches us to be brave and stand up for our beliefs, no matter how unpopular they may be.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of self-expression and the pursuit of pleasure, reminding us to live life to its fullest.
3. Finally, he encourages us to think critically and question the status quo, pushing us to challenge existing social norms and conventions.