Marquis de Sade — "My philosophy is simple: pleasure is the only good, and pain is the only evil."
My philosophy is simple: pleasure is the only good, and pain is the only evil.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"My philosophy is simple: pleasure above all else."
"The pleasure of love is in the variety of its forms."
"I write for myself, and for those who resemble me."
"I don't know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the mind's frailties."
"There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author."
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.