Marquis de Sade Quotes

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

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

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

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.

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

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.

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

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.

I've been to Hell. You've only read about it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.

Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?

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.

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.

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!

Sex without pain is like food without taste

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

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

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