Quotes from Marquis de Sade

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

Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.

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

The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.

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

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

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

The primary and most beautiful of nature's qualities is motion

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

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.

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

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

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?

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?

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

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.

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

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.

Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

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

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

Religions are the cradles of despotism.

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.