Words matter. These are the best Marquis de Sade Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.
Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?
No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.
‘Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.
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.
Religions are the cradles of despotism.
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
All universal moral principles are idle fancies.
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.
The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
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.
One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants.
Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
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.
In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
What is more immoral than war?
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.
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
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.
Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.
It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.
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.
Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.
Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
Sensual excess drives out pity in man.
Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
