Quotes by Marquis De Sade

“Womans destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her.”

“Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!”

“Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.”

“True felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.”

“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.”

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

“There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.”

“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, theres an end to it: his annihilation is final and entire, of him nothing survives.”

“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.”

“She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.”

“Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist”

“Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is womans entire but decisive advantage. Through mans passions, nature has given man into womans hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.”

“I want to put myself absolutely at your mercy for good or evil without any condition, without any limit to your power.”

“Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only mans egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.”

“Never feel secure with the woman you love, for there are more dangers in a womans nature than you imagine”