Love & Passion Quote by Marquis de Sade

De Sade doesn’t offer a romantic confession here so much as a cold diagnostic: what passes for “good faith” in love is often a license for possession. The line is engineered to scandalize by flipping the moral vocabulary. “Sincere” and “of good faith” should signal tenderness; he yokes them to a preference for death. That reversal is the point. By insisting the true lover would rather see a woman dead than sexually autonomous, de Sade drags jealousy out of the realm of regrettable feeling and into its logical, brutal endgame.

The subtext is that fidelity, in the social order he’s skewering, isn’t a mutual ethic but a property regime. “Mistress” matters: she’s defined by relation, not personhood, and the lover’s “preference” is a judgment rendered over her life. De Sade’s cynicism isn’t merely nihilistic; it’s forensic. He exposes how love can be staged as virtue while functioning as control, how honor becomes a euphemism for violence when male identity is tethered to female chastity.

Context sharpens the blade. Writing in an era obsessed with reputation, legitimacy, and patriarchal inheritance, de Sade treats erotic life as politics by other means. His libertine fiction routinely pushes appetites to extremes not just for shock, but to show the hidden premises of polite morality. The line reads like an indictment delivered in the language of confession: if you call jealousy devotion, don’t be surprised when devotion starts to look like a death wish.