Quotes from Marquis de Sade

The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

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.

The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime - for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.

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.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.

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

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.

'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.

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

No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.

The heart deceives, because it is never anything but the expression of the minds miscalculations I dont know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the minds frailties.

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

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

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.

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.

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

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

'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.

T requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.

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.

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

Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.