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.

— Marquis de Sade

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.

— Marquis de Sade

Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

Oh! My friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think...

— Marquis de Sade

Self-interest lies behind all that men do, forming the important motive for all their actions; this rule has never deceived me

— Marquis de Sade

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

— Marquis de Sade

...that tender compunction of the honest-minded, so different from the hateful intoxication of criminals...

— Marquis de Sade

The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man's revenge upon the strong; it's just what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet. And it shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as them.

— Marquis de Sade

The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

— Marquis de Sade