How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.
Marquis de SadeTo judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
Marquis de SadeCrime is to the passions what nervous fluid is to life: it sustains them, it supplies their strength.
Marquis de SadeGod strung up his own son like a side of veal. I shudder to think what he would do to me.
Marquis de SadeIf Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finish, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.
Marquis de Sade