Marquis de Sade
Marquis de Sade
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer, famous for his libertine sexuality. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts; in his lifetime some were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously and de Sade denied being their author. De Sade is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy against the...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 June 1740
CountryFrance
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.
Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!
Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?
I've been to Hell. You've only read about it.
All universal moral principles are idle fancies.
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.
It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.
Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear - those are the twin bases of every religion.
One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.
Hope is the most sensitive part of a poor wretch's soul; whoever raises it only to torment him is behaving like the executioners in Hell who, they say, incessantly renew old wounds and concentrate their attention on that area of it that is already lacerated.
It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
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.
I want to be the victim of his errors.
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.