My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.
Marquis De SadeRead
Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy! Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!
Interpretation
This quote expresses a passionate and tumultuous relationship with love, desire, and moral transgression.
In this quote, the speaker, influenced by the provocative and controversial philosophy of Marquis De Sade, conveys a deep and tumultuous relationship with love that openly embraces scandalous and immoral acts. The call to a dark deity highlights an intense yearning for deeper and more forbidden experiences, illustrating the complexity of human desire and the willingness to confront societal taboos in the pursuit of personal passion.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the complexities of love and morality in a literature class.
My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.
So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.
Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.
Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?
The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed.
Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!
Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other's presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid.
… and we are in bed together laughing and we don’t care about anything.
She raised her eyes to his. They had both come from misery, she thought, and survived it. They had been drawn together through violence and tragedy, and had overcome it. They walked different paths and had found a mutual route. Some things last, she thought. Some ordinary things. Like love.
She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
Because they have been in love they have survived everything that life could throw at them, even their own failures.
Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.
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