A biography for Marquis de Sadehasn’t been written yet.
“Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.”
“All universal moral principles are idle fancies.”
“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.”
“'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.”
“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?”
“Sensual excess drives out pity in man.”
“Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.”
“What is more immoral than war?”
“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.”
“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”
“Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.”
“Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.”
“Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.”
“The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.”
“The imagination serves us only when the mind is absolutely free of any prejudice. A single prejudice suffices to cool off the imagination. This whimsical part of the mind is so unbridled as to be uncontrollable. Its greatest triumphs, its most eminent delights consist in smashing all the restraints that oppose it. Imagination is the enemy of all norms, the idolater of all disorder and of all that bears the color of crime.”
“One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.”
“The man who alters his way of thinking to suit others is a fool.”