Top 160 Marquis de Sade Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.”

— Marquis de Sade

102. “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

103. “They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch.”

— Marquis de Sade

104. “The state of a moral man, is one of tranquillity and peace; the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest.”

— Marquis de Sade

105. “It is certainly no crime to depict the bizarre ideas that nature inspires.”

— Marquis de Sade

106. “It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.”

— Marquis de Sade

107. “No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.”

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

109. “Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.”

— Marquis de Sade

110. “How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze – those would be crimes indeed, and not the little excesses in which we indulge, which do no more than metamorphose, in the course of a year, a dozen creatures into clods of earth.”

— Marquis de Sade

111. “The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.”

— Marquis de Sade

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.”

— Marquis de Sade

117. “Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure: mystery only adds thereto.”

— Marquis de Sade

118. “The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.”

— Marquis de Sade

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “Religions are the cradles of despotism.”

— Marquis de Sade

124. “It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.”

— Marquis de Sade

125. “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

126. “Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.”

— Marquis de Sade

127. “Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.”

— Marquis de Sade

128. “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

129. “There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.”

— Marquis de Sade

130. “The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.”

— Marquis de Sade

131. “It is only by sacrificing everything to the senses’ pleasure that this individual, who never asked to be cast into this universe of woe, that this poor creature who goes under the name of Man, may be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life.”

— Marquis de Sade

132. “Mme de Franval, indulgent and sweet-natured as ever, and always happy when anything brought her closer to a man who was dearer to her than her own life, went along with all the desires of that treacherous husband, anticipated them, served them, and shared them without exception, not daring to make the most of the moment, as she should have done, to persuade that barbarian to treat her better, and not plunge his unhappy wife every day into an abyss of pain and suffering.”

— Marquis de Sade

133. “Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?”

— Marquis de Sade

134. “To lie is always a necessity for women; above all when they choose to deceive, falsehood becomes vital to them.”

— Marquis de Sade

135. “I wished to stifle the unhappy passion which burned in my soul; but is love an illness to be cured? All I endeavored to oppose to it merely fanned its flames.”

— Marquis de Sade

136. “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

137. “If we punished only the crimes we could prove, we would not enjoy the pleasure of dragging our fellow human beings to the scaffold so much as four times a century, and that is the only thing that makes us respected.”

— Marquis de Sade

138. “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

139. “From the two things one: either my husband is a brutal, jealous one, or he’s a refined man; in the first hypothesis, the best I can do is to revenge myself for his conduct; in the second, I would know not to burden myself; since I taste of pleasures, he’ll be happy for it if he’s honest: there’s not a refined man who doesn’t take pleasure at the spectacle of the happiness of the person he adores.”

— Marquis de Sade

140. “Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness.”

— Marquis de Sade

141. “The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man’s revenge upon the strong; it’s just what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet. And it shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as they.”

— Marquis de Sade

142. “Thus, that happiness the two sexes cannot find with the other they will find, one in blind obedience, the other in the most energetic expression of his domination.”

— Marquis de Sade

143. “Remorse! Can a heart like mine ever know the meaning of such a feeling? The habit of evildoing expunged it long ago from my calloused soul.”

— Marquis de Sade

144. “One would have to lose one’s wits to believe in a God, and to become a complete imbecile to adore Him.”

— Marquis de Sade

145. “There is no stupidity religions have omitted to revere; and you know just as well as I, my friends, that when one examines a human institution, the first thing one must do is discard all religious notions. They are poison to lucidity.”

— Marquis de Sade

146. “You are afraid of the people unrestrained-how ridiculous!”

— Marquis de Sade

147. “He who perpetrates an outrage may well be quick to forget what he has done. But they who have suffered at his hands are justified at least in remembering the wrongs he has done them.”

— Marquis de Sade

148. “It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.”

— Marquis de Sade

149. “The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable. A traveler journeys along a fine road. It has been strewn with traps. He falls into one. Do you say it is the traveler’s fault, or that of the scoundrel who lays the traps?”

— Marquis de Sade

150. “Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination. It is a manner of being moved which relies solely upon the way we see and feel. Except for the satisfaction of needs, there is nothing which makes all men equally happy. Not a day goes by but that we see one person made happy by something that supremely displeases another. Therefore, there is certain or fixed happiness, and the only happiness possible for us is the one we form with the help of our organs and our principles.”

— Marquis de Sade