Marquis de Sade

“There is no more lively sensation than that of pain its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.”

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

“Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.”

“Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.”

“To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.”

“Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.”

“There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself in no wise hath she need of an author.”

“Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates.”

“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.”

“The primary and most beautiful of Nature's qualities is motion, which agitates her at all times, but this motion is simply a perpetual consequence of crimes, she conserves it by means of crimes only.”

“Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.”

“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.”

“The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.”

“What is more immoral than war?”