Marquis de Sade — "The greatest pleasure is to feel oneself superior to others."
The greatest pleasure is to feel oneself superior to others.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Virtue, for me, is merely a word."
"The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable."
"I have spent my life in prisons, and I have found the solitude to be a great source of inspiration."
"The more one sins, the more one lives."
"No need to touch at greater length on what pertains to the full business of population, from now on we shall address ourselves principally, nay, uniquely to those libertine lecheries whose spirit is i…"
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.