Top 160 Marquis de Sade Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

53. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

55. “How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!”

— Marquis de Sade

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

61. “Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.”

— Marquis de Sade

62. “A man learns nothing when he talks; he learns by listening. Which is why those who talk the most are, in the ordinary run of things, fools.”

— Marquis de Sade

63. “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

64. “Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.”

— Marquis de Sade

65. “What is more immoral than war?”

— Marquis de Sade

66. “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.”

— Marquis de Sade

67. “Now I beg of you to tell me whether I must love a human being simply because he exists or resembles me and whether for those reasons alone I must suddenly prefer him to myself?”

— Marquis de Sade

68. “There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

70. “I am about to put foward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.”

— Marquis de Sade

71. “My vengeance needs blood.”

— Marquis de Sade

72. “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

73. “The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.”

— Marquis de Sade

74. “Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

76. “The time has come, friendly reader, for you to prepare your heart and mind for the most impure tale ever written since the world began, for no such book may be found among either the ancients or the moderns.”

— Marquis de Sade

77. “The more amorous the President became, the more his fatuousness made him intolerable: there is nothing in the world as comical as a lawyer in love – he is the perfect picture of gaucheness, impertinence and ineptitude.”

— Marquis de Sade

78. “And there you see what happens to the promises of eternal love which we women are foolish enough to believe! The more affectionate we are, the more likely it is that our seducers will desert us... the unfeeling brutes... the more we try to keep them, the greater the chance that they will abandon us.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

80. “There is not a living man who does not wish to play the despot when he is stiff: it seems to him his joy is less when others appear to have as much fun as he; by an impulse of pride, very natural at this juncture, he would like to be the only one in the world capable of experiencing what he feels: the idea of seeing another enjoy as he enjoys reduces him to a kind of equality with that other, which impairs the unspeakable charm despotism causes him to feel.”

— Marquis de Sade

81. “He, being hacked and cut for three solid quarters of an hour by the vigorous hands that had taken charge of his education, was soon nothing but a single wound, from which blood spurted out on all sides.”

— Marquis de Sade

82. “The philosopher who travels the world in order to learn must put up with all customs, all religions, all kinds of weather and climate, all beds and all kinds of food, and leave to the voluptuous, indolent man in the capital his prejudices... his luxury... that obscene luxury that, as it never contains any real needs, creates artificial ones every day at the expense of fortune and health.”

— Marquis de Sade

83. “It has been estimated that more than 50 million individuals have lost their lives to wars and religious massacres. Is there even one among them worth the blood of a single bird?”

— Marquis de Sade

84. “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

85. “Time to yield, Valcour. Life henceforth offers you none but thorns. Unite your soul with those of your friends. Once more: read on, I say, and go to your grave.”

— Marquis de Sade

86. “There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

88. “Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.”

— Marquis de Sade

89. “Women are not made for one single man; ’tis for men at large Nature created them.”

— Marquis de Sade

90. “One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants.”

— Marquis de Sade

91. “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

92. “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

93. “The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.”

— Marquis de Sade

94. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

96. “The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all;.”

— Marquis de Sade

97. “One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.”

— Marquis de Sade

98. “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

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

— Marquis de Sade

100. “Nothing quite encourages as does one’s first unpunished crime.”

— Marquis de Sade