The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales Quotes

“Sade was not the Great Liberator so many have seen in him but the creator of a terrible, horrific, vision which is the death of hope, of history, of civilization itself.”
― David Coward, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“If Sade's books are the kind which the French inelegantly describe as needing to be read with one hand, it is a sensible precaution to hold a sick-bowl in the other.”
― David Coward, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“Sade's ultimate achievement was to make sex the choicest expression of obscene cruelty and absolute, despotic power.”
― David Coward, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“...since Nature needs vice as much as she needs virtue, she directed me towards the first when she found it expedient, and when she had need of the second, she filled me with the appropriate desires to which I surrendered equally promptly. Do not seek further than her laws for the cause of our human inconsistency, and to explain her laws look not beyond her will and her needs.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“Well, what do you say to such thighs? Tell me, did ever temple of love stand on such fair columns?”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“Now in society, which is to say in that press of human beings brought together by boredom and made duller still by collective stupidity, it is very amusing to chat away for a couple of hours without actually saying anything, so utterly delicious to shine at the expense of others and raise with due censoriousness the issue of a vice that is quite foreign to one's own nature-and this of course amounts to a kind of indirect singing of one's own praises.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“I should be more convinced if I were to see you resisting the attacks of guileful men. The woman whose virtue is most clearly established is not she who always goes out of her way to avoid a seducer but she who is sufficiently sure of herself to face any situation without fear.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“All human morality is contained in these words: make others as happy as you yourself would be, and never serve them more ill than you would yourself be served. These, my dear fellow, are the only principles which we should follow. There is no need of religion or God to appreciate and act upon them: the sole requirement is a good heart.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“In any case, nothingness is neither ghastly nor absolute. Is not Nature's never-ending process of generation and regeneration plain for my eyes to see? Nothing perishes, nothing on this earth is destroyed. Today a man, tomorrow a worm, the day after a fly-what is this if not eternal life?”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“It is enough that the law condemns and the sword of justice punishes for us to feel aversion or terror for such crimes. But once they have, regrettably, been committed, we must accept the inevitable and not surrender to remorse which is pointless. Remorse is null since it did not prevent us from committing the crime, and void since it does not enable us to make amends: it would be absurd to surrender to it...”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“Let us rather acquire the habit of thinking of actions which make us remorseful as being neutral; let us judge them in the light of a serious study of the manners and customs of all the nations of the world; and then, having looked at them in this way, let us commit those actions again, whatever they may be, as often as we can. Then should we see the torch of reason put an end to remorse...”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“If you repeat over and over the actions which make you feel remorseful, you would quickly put out their fire. Raise the torch of passion against them, vent on them the irresistible laws of self-interest, and you will discover that they evaporate like the morning mist. Remorse is not the infallible test of crime: it is no more than the badge of a mind which is easily enslaved.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“... whence comes the impulse which leads us to do evil? Is it not implanted in us by the hand of Providence? Is there a single wish or sensation which does not come to us from the same source? Is it therefore reasonable to argue that Providence would allow us keep, or give us a taste for anything which would not further its designs?”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“By creating men unequal in strength, Nature has clearly shown us her wish that inequality be preserved, even though civilization should alter natural laws. The poor have replaced the weak, as I have already explained. To ease their plight would mean overturning the established order, opposing the natural order, and destroying the balance which underpins Nature's sublime arrangement of things.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“...if there are men who, whether moved by vengeance or by ignoble sensuality, can take pleasure from the pain of others, then there are others barbaric enough to enjoy the same delights for no other motive than to feel their power or indulge the most ghoulish curiosity. Man is thus naturally evil.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“The slave talks of gratitude to his master because he stands in need of it, but the master, guided by his passions and by Nature, must yield only to what promotes his interest or flatters him. Oblige whomever you like if you find pleasure in it, but do not expect rewards for enjoying the experience.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“... this sense of gratitude on which you stake your claims on me, Sophie, is not recognized by Nature . It was never a part of her laws that the pleasure one person took in obliging another should be a reason for the recipient to abandon his rights over his benefactor. Are these sentiments in which you take such pride to be found among animals which are examples to us all?”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“... in spite of this change in the manner by which an individual came by his power, the superiority of the strong over the weak remained fundamental to the laws of Nature, according to which it mattered not if the rope which secured the weak was held by a man who was rich or a man who was strong, or whether its coils weighed heaviest on the weakest or the poorest.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“When the strong first set out to enslave the weak, they convinced their victims that God sanctified the chains that bound them, and the weak, their wits crushed by poverty, believed what they were told. All religions are the destructive consequences of this first fiction and merit the same contempt as its source deserves.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“Now, all forms are equal in the eyes of Nature . Nothing is lost in the immense melting-pot where endless variations are produced. Each quantity of matter thrown into it is continually renewed and given a new shape. Whatever part we play in the process cannot offend directly against the whole. Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power. So of what concern is it to Nature, endlessly creating, if a mound of flesh which today has the shape of a woman, should reproduce itself tomorrow as countless insects of different types?”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“It is regrettably only too commonly observed that sensual excess drives out pity in man. Its ordinary effect is to harden the heart. Whether this is because most carnal excesses require a kind of apathy of soul or whether the violent effect they produce on the nervous system weakens the sensitivity by which it operates, it nevertheless remains a fact that a professional libertine is rarely a compassionate man .”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“... be persuaded that if Providence places us in situations where acting wickedly becomes necessary and at the same time allows us to choose to be wicked, then its laws are served no less well by evil than by good and Providence thus gains as much by the one as by the other. The state into which we were born at her behest is a state of equality. Whoever disturbs that state is no more guilty than anyone who seeks to restore it, for both parties act upon impulses implanted in them, and have no choice but to act upon them, clap a blindfold to their eyes, and enjoy the result.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“Such is the blindness of people nowadays that the more impure one of these unfortunates shows herself to be, the keener they are to be on her list. It is as though the depth of her depravity and corruption is the only yardstick by which the feelings which they lavish so shamelessly on her in public are to be measured.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales

“...in so saying, the holy man had placed his hand beneath her chin and gave her far too worldly a kiss for a man of the cloth...”
― Marquis de Sade, The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales