Marquis de Sade — "The essence of pleasure is in its excess."
The essence of pleasure is in its excess.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Nature has made us perverse, and we are only following her dictates."
"It is not by the means of a religion that we can conquer nature, but by the means of nature that we can conquer religion."
"My manner of thinking, so you say, is an abomination. And yet, I have never been able to think otherwise."
"Ah, a little of this, a little of that, it's my life's happiness, you know. I've not much patience with mild or tidy pleasures."
"What are all the pleasures of the senses compared to the infinite joys of the spirit?"
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.