314 Quotes by Marquis de Sade

   'Not all women have the failings that I must have had, given that I have not succeeded in tying you to me,' she said, and added, with a sigh, 'or else not all husbands are like you.'   'Wives...false, jealous, domineering, flirtatious, or devout...husbands, wicked, inconstant, cruel or despotic: that in a nutshell is how all individuals on earth are, Madame; do not expect to find any paragons of virtue.'   

How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze – those would be crimes indeed, and not the little excesses in which we indulge, which do no more than metamorphose, in the course of a year, a dozen creatures into clods of earth.

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.

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.

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.

What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you...every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

Fuck! Is one expected to be a gentleman when one is stiff?

and how can you be happy when you can find satisfaction at any moment? It is not in pleasure that happiness consists, it is in desire – it is in breaking the chains that hold back this desire;

When a man loves a woman, as our old troubadours used to say, even if he has heard or seen something that puts his beloved in a bad light, he should believe neither his ears nor his eyes, he should listen to his heart alone.