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Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

Marquis de Sade

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Marquis de Sade
Age: 74 †
Born: 1740
Born: June 2
Died: 1814
Died: December 2
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Writer
Paris
France
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade
Marquis De Sade
Donatien Alphonse François Sade
Comte de Sade
marquis de Sade
Fiction
Imagination
Literature
Less
Truth

More quotes by Marquis de Sade

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It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
Marquis de Sade
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The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.
Marquis de Sade
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If the objects who serve us feel ecstacy, they are much more often concerned with themselves than with us, and our own enjoyment is consequently impaired. The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.
Marquis de Sade
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Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
Marquis de Sade
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I have supported my deviations with reasons I did not stop at mere doubt I have vanquished, I have uprooted, I have destroyed everything in my heart that might have interfered with my pleasure.
Marquis de Sade
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Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
Marquis de Sade
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Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?
Marquis de Sade
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Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.
Marquis de Sade
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There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.
Marquis de Sade
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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.
Marquis de Sade
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I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it.
Marquis de Sade
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Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.
Marquis de Sade
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One must do violence to the object of one's desire when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
Marquis de Sade
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Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.
Marquis de Sade
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'Til the infallibility of human judgements shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the penalty of death.
Marquis de Sade
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The pleasure of the senses is always regulated in accordance with the imagination. Man can aspire to felicity only by serving all the whims of his imagination.
Marquis de Sade
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Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.
Marquis de Sade
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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.
Marquis de Sade
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Happiness is ideal, it is the work of the imagination.
Marquis de Sade
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Can we become other than what we are?
Marquis de Sade