Virtue Quotes

“Virtue only needs to be worshipped; it follows the path to happiness...it must be so, a thousand arms open to receive its devotees, if they are pursued by adversity. But everybody deserts the guilty man...one blushes at one's attachment to him or at the tears one sheds for him, there is a fear of contagion, he is banished from everybody's hearts, and one condemns out of pride the man one ought to help out of humanity.”
― Marquis de Sade, Virtue

“She made him appreciate that a man with the birth and status of Oxtiern must be incapable of deceit. The innocent creature! She did not know that vices, supported by birth and wealth, and then emboldened by impunity, only become more dangerous.”
― Marquis de Sade, Virtue

“Crime causes so much horror, even to them [criminals], that they would like, in order to escape from the necessity they feel to be bad, to be believed and always to be depicted as virtuous.”
― Marquis de Sade, Virtue

“You have no idea, my friend, of the effect of a young woman's tears on all these weak and timid souls.”
― Marquis de Sade, Virtue

“Without principles and without virtue, and still full of the prejudices of that group of men whose pride had just led them to fight against the sovereign himself, Oxtiern imagined that nothing in the world could curb his passions. Well, of all those that burned within him, love was the most impetuous; but this feeling, which can be almost a virtue in a good soul, is bound to become the source of many crimes in a corrupt heart like that of Oxtiern.”
― Marquis de Sade, Virtue

“The philosopher who travels the world in order to learn must put up with all customs, all religions, all kinds of weather and climate, all beds and all kinds of food, and leave to the voluptuous, indolent man in the capital his prejudices...his luxury...that obscene luxury that, as it never contains any real needs, creates artificial ones every day at the expense of fortune and health.”
― Marquis de Sade, Virtue