Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
– Marquis de Sade
What is more immoral than war?
– Marquis de Sade
Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.
– Marquis de Sade
To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
– Marquis de Sade
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
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself in no wise hath she need of an author.
– Marquis de Sade
The primary and most beautiful of Nature's qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times, but this motion is simply a perpetual consequence of crimes, she conserves it by means of crimes only.
– Marquis de Sade
The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
– 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?
– Marquis de Sade
No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.
– Marquis de Sade
Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.
– Marquis de Sade
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.
– Marquis de Sade
Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
– Marquis de Sade
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
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.
– Marquis de Sade
Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
– Marquis de Sade
Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates.
– Marquis de Sade
Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.
– Marquis de Sade
All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost - the most legitimate - passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.
– Marquis de Sade
'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.