Top 160 Marquis de Sade Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “First ourselves, then the others: this is Nature’s order of progression. Consequently, we must show no respect, no quarter for others as soon as they have shown that our misfortune or our ruin is the object of their desires. To act differently, my daughter, would be show preference for others above ourselves, and that would be absurd.”

— Marquis de Sade

152. “Those who have no principles are never more dangerous than when they reach the age when they lose all sense of shame. Their hearts are gangrened by depravity, they refine and polish up their first offences and convert them into heinous crimes while still believing they are still at the stage of minor misdemeanours.”

— Marquis de Sade

153. “What do I care for Williams? What do I care for anything on this earth? Listen, my dear fellow, when this combustible heart of mine falls in love, there is no obstacle capable of preventing it from being satisfied. The more I fall in love, the more combustible it becomes. For me, having a woman is satisfying only by reason of the trouble I am put to on the way. Bedding a woman is the most prosaic thing in the world.”

— Marquis de Sade

154. “Now we come to the crux of my philosophy: if the taking of pleasure is enhanced by the criminal character of the circumstances – if, indeed, the pleasure taken is directly proportionate to the severity of the crime involved –, then is it not criminality itself which is pleasurable, and the seemingly pleasure-producing act nothing more than the instrument of its realization?”

— Marquis de Sade

155. “Virtue only needs to be worshipped; it follows the path to happiness... it must be so, a thousand arms open to receive its devotees, if they are pursued by adversity. But everybody deserts the guilty man... one blushes at one’s attachment to him or at the tears one sheds for him, there is a fear of contagion, he is banished from everybody’s hearts, and one condemns out of pride the man one ought to help out of humanity.”

— Marquis de Sade

156. “Tormented virtue fidgets while vice takes its repose.”

— Marquis de Sade

157. “Please be forewarned that much of the content of this novella is extremely sexually graphic and at times violent. Read at your own volition and emotional risk.”

— Marquis de Sade

158. “It has pleased Nature so to make us that we attain happiness only by way of pain.”

— Marquis de Sade

159. “He would doubtless have promised anything for the mere pleasure of breaking all bounds; perhaps he would even have liked her to ask him to swear on oath so he could add the attractions of perjury to his horrible pleasures.”

— Marquis de Sade

160. “She made him appreciate that a man with the birth and status of Oxtiern must be incapable of deceit. The innocent creature! She did not know that vices, supported by birth and wealth, and then emboldened by impunity, only become more dangerous.”

— Marquis de Sade

161. “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.35.”

— Marquis de Sade

162. “The President was in seventh heaven when he heard himself being teased like this; he strutted about and thrust his chest out; never did a man of the robe stick out his neck so far, not even one who has just hanged a man.”

— Marquis de Sade

163. “Nothing that makes one hard is wicked and the only crime in the world is to refuse oneself that pleasure.”

— Marquis de Sade

164. “The laws vainly try to talk virtue to the mass, but it’s just talk. The people who make the laws are really too biased towards evil and never carry out their fine talk – they merely make a stab at it for the sake of appearances, that’s all.”

— Marquis de Sade

165. “Without principles and without virtue, and still full of the prejudices of that group of men whose pride had just led them to fight against the sovereign himself, Oxtiern imagined that nothing in the world could curb his passions. Well, of all those that burned within him, love was the most impetuous; but this feeling, which can be almost a virtue in a good soul, is bound to become the source of many crimes in a corrupt heart like that of Oxtiern.”

— Marquis de Sade

166. “Nothing is as encouraging as a first crime that goes unpunished.”

— Marquis de Sade

167. “In a society full of vice, virtue will never be useful.”

— Marquis de Sade

168. “MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE – Divine teacher, will you resist the proposal? will you not be tempted by this sublime ass? See how it doth yawn, how it winks at thee!”

— Marquis de Sade

169. “He buggers him, and during this act of sodomy he opens the skull, removes the brain and replaces it with molten lead.”

— Marquis de Sade

170. “How many times, by God’s bloody prick, have I longed to be able to detonate planets, to destroy the sun itself, to pluck it from the universe and crash it into the earth, annihilating all Creation and replacing it with a lightless void of violence. Ah, that would be a crime! A cosmic crime, dwarfing the petty misdemeanours we are committing here, limited as we are to snuffing out a few meaningless souls.”

— Marquis de Sade

171. “Evil acts make me hard – I find in evil a charm piquant enough to awaken every sensation of pleasure in me, and I give myself to evil for evil alone, and without any other interest than evil alone.”

— Marquis de Sade

172. “These same men who are always in power realize the advantage of vice and unscrupulousness and wish everybody else to be virtuous so that they alone might have the greater benefit of this advantage, and get the upper hand.”

— Marquis de Sade

173. “Simone de Beauvoir has argued, perhaps counter-intuitively, that Sade deserves to be regarded as a moraliste for the ethical reflection he inspires in his readers: Sade drained to the dregs the moment of selfishness, injustice, misery, and he insisted upon its truth. The supreme value of his testimony lies in its ability to disturb us. It forces us to re-examine thoroughly the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man.37.”

— Marquis de Sade

174. “This is what men have done to me. This is what I have learnt from the dangers of associating with them. Is it surprising that, embittered by misfortune and revolted by outrages and injustices, I should in my heart aspire only to avoid all contact with them in the future?”

— Marquis de Sade

175. “We owe more to habit than to Nature, my friend. The latter creates us; the other shapes us.”

— Marquis de Sade

176. “How is it possible to act so harshly after having been so unhappy? I’d always believed misfortune nudges open the soul, that remembering the pains we ourselves endured, our heart grows more sensitive to the suffering of others. I was wrong. Unhappiness hardens people, dulling them to their own pain; one grows accustomed to be unmoved by that of others, to remain impassive in the face of attack and therefore indifferent to blows that strike others.”

— Marquis de Sade

177. “It is utterly misguided to say that the mouth of a woman or young boy must be absolutely clean in order to give pleasure; putting all manias to one side, I shall grant you if you wish that a man who craves a stinking mouth does so only out of depravity, but you must in return grant me that a mouth without the slightest fragrance gives no pleasure at all when kissed – there must always be a certain spice, a certain piquancy to all such pleasures and this picquancy is found only in a little filth.”

— Marquis de Sade

178. “For any citizen who does wrong you must have but one objective. If you wish to be fair, let his punishment be useful to him and others; anything that deviates from that aim is infamy.”

— Marquis de Sade

179. “But must we always relate everything to the senses?′ asked the Bishop. ‘Everything, my friend,’ said Durcet. ‘They alone must guide us in all our actions in life, because their voice alone is truly imperious.”

— Marquis de Sade