Marquis de Sade — "The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do."
The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"I am a philosopher, and I have the right to think what I please."
"There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image."
"Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life."
"Crime is the soul of lust."
"It is always by means of crimes that empires are founded."
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.
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Attributed, often found in collections of his quotes, but direct source difficult to pinpoint.
Date: Late 18th Century
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