Marquis de Sade — "Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is cr…"
Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"An enjoyment that is shared is enfeebled. This is a recognised truth; if you try to give enjoyment to the object of your pleasures, you will soon have to recognise the fact that you are doing so at yo…"
"I have always been convinced that the universe is a place of perpetual motion, and that this motion is always tending towards destruction."
"Nature has granted me a temperament that is too ardent, a soul too impetuous, a character too strong, for me to be able to submit to the yoke of any laws."
"It is not by the force of the lash that one brings down a human being to the level of the beast."
"There are,' said Curval, 'but two or three crimes to perform in this world, and they, once done, there's no more to be said; all the rest is inferior, you cease any longer to feel."
About Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)
French aristocrat-libertine whose name became 'sadism' and whose novels test the limits of Enlightenment liberalism's 'do as you will' axiom. Closely associated with Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses author). For an intellectual contrast, see Immanuel Kant, German Enlightenment philosopher of the categorical imperative — Sade and Kant published in the same decades; Kant's 'treat others as ends, never means' is the systematic ethical opposite of Sade's libertine instrumentalism — the two roads philosophy took out of Enlightenment freedom.
The standard scholarly entry points to Marquis de Sade's work: Maurice Blanchot (French literary critic) — Lautréamont and Sade (1949); Jacques Lacan (École freudienne de Paris) — Kant with Sade (1963 essay); Camille Paglia (University of the Arts Philadelphia) — Sexual Personae (1990) — extensive Sade chapters. These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Marquis de Sade.