Marquis de Sade, born Donatien-Alphonse-François in 1740 in Paris, was a French nobleman known for his erotic writings, from which the term “sadism” originates.
His most notable work is “Justine” (1791). Descending from the royal house of Condé, de Sade’s aristocratic upbringing allowed him to pursue a military career.
Despite marriage to a woman from a distinguished family, de Sade engaged in numerous affairs and acts of debauchery, resulting in multiple imprisonments.
One significant scandal involved Rose Keller, a prostitute he abused. His writings, often produced during imprisonments, delved deep into themes of sexual perversion and atheism.
Transferred between various prisons, including the Bastille, he was eventually confined to an insane asylum.
Despite facing numerous challenges, he contributed to revolutionary causes and saved the lives of some who once imprisoned him.
Posthumously, his works, previously suppressed, gained attention, marking him as an influential “damned writer” in literature.
I have listed the best quotes by Marquis de Sade.
Best Marquis de Sade Quotes
One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Any enjoyment is weakened when shared. ~ Marquis de Sade.
The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced. ~ Marquis de Sade.
The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool. ~ Marquis de Sade.
God strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me. ~ 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.
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. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence. ~ 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.
I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Inspiring Marquis de Sade Quotes
If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be. ~ Marquis de Sade.
The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect. ~ Marquis de Sade.
There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Variety, multiplicity are the two most powerful vehicles of lust. ~ Marquis de Sade.
It is certainly no crime to depict the bizarre ideas that nature inspires. ~ Marquis de Sade.
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? ~ Marquis de Sade.
I would, thank God, watch the universe perish without shedding a tear. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Beauty belongs to the sphere of the simple, the ordinary, whilst ugliness is something extraordinary, and there is no question but that every ardent imagination prefers in lubricity, the extraordinary to the commonplace. ~ Marquis de Sade.
And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior? ~ Marquis de Sade.
Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Top Marquis de Sade Quotes
Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Women are not made for one single man; ’tis for men at large Nature created them. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I’d say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice! ~ Marquis de Sade.
It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure. ~ Marquis de Sade.
I want to be the victim of his errors. ~ Marquis de Sade.
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author. ~ Marquis de Sade.
My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! ~ Marquis de Sade.
The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction. ~ Marquis de Sade.
They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch. ~ Marquis de Sade.
No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable. ~ 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.
Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Sensual excess drives out pity in man. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Profound Marquis de Sade Quotes
Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need. ~ Marquis de Sade.
The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes. ~ Marquis de Sade.
I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Love Is Stronger Than Pride. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it? ~ Marquis de Sade.
Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil. ~ Marquis de Sade.
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.
Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Religions are the cradles of despotism. ~ Marquis de Sade.
The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way. ~ Marquis de Sade.
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. ~ Marquis de Sade.
It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures. ~ Marquis de Sade.
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.
The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change. ~ Marquis de Sade.
We monsters are necessary to nature also. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Famous Marquis de Sade Quotes
Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others. ~ Marquis de Sade.
How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart! ~ Marquis de Sade.
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Sex without pain is like food without taste. ~ Marquis de Sade.
In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature’s mandates. ~ Marquis de Sade.
I don’t know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the mind’s frailties. ~ Marquis de Sade.
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. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed? ~ Marquis de Sade.
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.
It has been estimated that more than 50 million individuals have lost their lives to wars and religious massacres. Is there even one among them worth the blood of a single bird? ~ Marquis de Sade.
True happiness lies in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Popular Marquis de Sade Quotes
There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers? ~ Marquis de Sade.
One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush. ~ Marquis de Sade.
I have supported my deviations with reasons; I did not stop at mere doubt; I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. ~ Marquis de Sade.
I am about to put forward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Can we become other than what we are? ~ 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.
One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants. ~ Marquis de Sade.
The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Crime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength. ~ Marquis de Sade.
It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others. ~ Marquis de Sade.
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. ~ 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.
Inspirational Marquis de Sade Quotes
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.
So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public. ~ Marquis de Sade.
Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime. ~ Marquis de Sade.
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.
In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice. ~ Marquis de Sade.
For mortal men there is but one hell, and that is the folly and wickedness and spite of his fellows; but once his life is over, there’s an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives. ~ Marquis de Sade.
All universal moral principles are idle fancies. ~ 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.
So these were the 92 top Marquis de Sade quotes and sayings.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Clarissa Pinkola Estés quotes and Paul Walker quotes.
