Consider the problem from the point of view of evil, evil being almost always pleasure's true and major charm; considered thus, the crime must appear greater when perpetrated upon a being of your identical sort than when inflicted upon one which is not, and this once established, the delight automatically doubles.

Marquis de Sade

Categorized in : Truth Light Honesty

Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.

Marquis de Sade

pain perfect sex

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

Marquis de Sade

kinky vices order

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.

Marquis de Sade

passion voice giving

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

Marquis de Sade

kinky pain way

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

Marquis de Sade

quills running conversation

I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

Marquis de Sade

kinky literature heart

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

Marquis de Sade

surrender violence desire

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

Marquis de Sade

fitness love life

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.

Marquis de Sade

wave sea sex

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

Marquis de Sade

animal men thinking

You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere is a fool. My way of thinking is the result of my reflections. It is part of my inner being,the way I am made. I do not contradict them, and would not even if I wished to. For my system, which you disapprove of is also my greatest comfort in life, the source of all my happiness -it means more to me than my life itself.

Marquis de Sade

reflection mean thinking

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

Marquis de Sade

shame dangerous

Your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments; hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born.

Marquis de Sade

punishment self law

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.

Marquis de Sade

take-me-as-i-am atheism imagination

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.

Marquis de Sade

imagination mean world

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I'll be damned if I ever change.

Marquis de Sade

take-me-as-i-am kill-me life

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Marquis de Sade

intriguing monsters

My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.

Marquis de Sade

passion glasses fire

Don't have children: they deform women's bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.

Marquis de Sade

children sex years

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.

Marquis de Sade

love life sex