Marquis de Sade — "Nothing that makes one hard is wicked and the only crime in the world is to refu…"
Nothing that makes one hard is wicked and the only crime in the world is to refuse oneself that pleasure.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"The true way to live is to be without any laws."
"The only way to arrive at the truth is to examine everything, to deny nothing, to reject nothing."
"I have no God, no morality, no law but my will. I reject the poison that they call religion, for it is nothing but a chain that binds the soul, a vile invention of the cowardly man to escape the torme…"
"The most beautiful things are those that are conceived in hell and born in heaven."
"But I am not complaining, I cherish my vices, I abhor virtue; I am the sworn enemy of all religions, of all gods and godlings, I fear neither the ills of life nor what follows death; and when you're l…"
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.