In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
Nothing that makes one hard is wicked and the only crime in the world is to refuse oneself that pleasure.
Nothing is as encouraging as a first crime that goes unpunished.
Evil acts make me hard – I find in evil a charm piquant enough to awaken every sensation of pleasure in me, and I give myself to evil for evil alone, and without any other interest than evil alone.
The time has come, friendly reader, for you to prepare your heart and mind for the most impure tale ever written since the world began, for no such book may be found among either the ancients or the moderns.
It is utterly misguided to say that the mouth of a woman or young boy must be absolutely clean in order to give pleasure; putting all manias to one side, I shall grant you if you wish that a man who craves a stinking mouth does so only out of depravity, but you must in return grant me that a mouth without the slightest fragrance gives no pleasure at all when kissed – there must always be a certain spice, a certain piquancy to all such pleasures and this picquancy is found only in a little filth.
He buggers him, and during this act of sodomy he opens the skull, removes the brain and replaces it with molten lead.
But must we always relate everything to the senses?′ asked the Bishop. ‘Everything, my friend,’ said Durcet. ‘They alone must guide us in all our actions in life, because their voice alone is truly imperious.
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.35.
Tormented virtue fidgets while vice takes its repose.
Please be forewarned that much of the content of this novella is extremely sexually graphic and at times violent. Read at your own volition and emotional risk.
Time to yield, Valcour. Life henceforth offers you none but thorns. Unite your soul with those of your friends. Once more: read on, I say, and go to your grave.
For any citizen who does wrong you must have but one objective. If you wish to be fair, let his punishment be useful to him and others; anything that deviates from that aim is infamy.
We owe more to habit than to Nature, my friend. The latter creates us; the other shapes us.
How is it possible to act so harshly after having been so unhappy? I’d always believed misfortune nudges open the soul, that remembering the pains we ourselves endured, our heart grows more sensitive to the suffering of others. I was wrong. Unhappiness hardens people, dulling them to their own pain; one grows accustomed to be unmoved by that of others, to remain impassive in the face of attack and therefore indifferent to blows that strike others.
Simone de Beauvoir has argued, perhaps counter-intuitively, that Sade deserves to be regarded as a moraliste for the ethical reflection he inspires in his readers: Sade drained to the dregs the moment of selfishness, injustice, misery, and he insisted upon its truth. The supreme value of his testimony lies in its ability to disturb us. It forces us to re-examine thoroughly the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man.37.
This is what men have done to me. This is what I have learnt from the dangers of associating with them. Is it surprising that, embittered by misfortune and revolted by outrages and injustices, I should in my heart aspire only to avoid all contact with them in the future?
In a society full of vice, virtue will never be useful.
How many times, by God’s bloody prick, have I longed to be able to detonate planets, to destroy the sun itself, to pluck it from the universe and crash it into the earth, annihilating all Creation and replacing it with a lightless void of violence. Ah, that would be a crime! A cosmic crime, dwarfing the petty misdemeanours we are committing here, limited as we are to snuffing out a few meaningless souls.
These same men who are always in power realize the advantage of vice and unscrupulousness and wish everybody else to be virtuous so that they alone might have the greater benefit of this advantage, and get the upper hand.
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE – Divine teacher, will you resist the proposal? will you not be tempted by this sublime ass? See how it doth yawn, how it winks at thee!