Top 160 Marquis de Sade Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We monsters are necessary to nature also.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

3. “Sex without pain is like food without taste.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

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5. “Love Is Stronger Than Pride.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

7. “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.”

— Marquis de Sade

8. “I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.”

— Marquis de Sade

9. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

11. “Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.”

— Marquis de Sade

12. “Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?”

— Marquis de Sade

13. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

15. “Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates.”

— Marquis de Sade

16. “Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.”

— Marquis de Sade

17. “And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?”

— Marquis de Sade

18. “All universal moral principles are idle fancies.”

— Marquis de Sade

19. “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.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

21. “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

22. “In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do.”

— Marquis de Sade

23. “Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.”

— Marquis de Sade

24. “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.”

— Marquis de Sade

25. “Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.”

— Marquis de Sade

26. “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.”

— Marquis de Sade

27. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

29. “I want to be the victim of his errors.”

— Marquis de Sade

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

34. “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?”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion.”

— Marquis de Sade

40. “Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

43. “Can we become other than what we are?”

— Marquis de Sade

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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