Quotes from 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.

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.

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

T requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.

Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.

Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.

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.

No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.

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.

To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.

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.

Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!