Do the meager pleasures you have been able to enjoy during your fall compensate for the torments which now rend your heart? Happiness therefore lies only in virtue, my child, and all the sophistries of its detractors can never procure a single one of its delights.

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.

— 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.

— Marquis de Sade

He, being hacked and cut for three solid quarters of an hour by the vigorous hands that had taken charge of his education, was soon nothing but a single wound, from which blood spurted out on all sides.

— Marquis de Sade

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.

— Marquis de Sade

If, though full of respect for social conventions and never overstepping the bounds they draw round us, if, nonetheless, it should come to pass that the wicked tread upon flowers, will it not be decided that it is preferable to abandon oneself to the tide rather than to resist it? Will it not be felt that Virtue, however beautiful, becomes the worst of all attitudes when it is found too feeble to contend with Vice, and that, in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others?

— Marquis de Sade

In order to know virtue, we must acquaint ourselves with vice. Only then can we know the true measure of a man.

— Marquis de Sade

It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns

— Marquis de Sade

I want to be the victim of his errors.

— Marquis de Sade