Marquis de Sade — "The only true happiness is that which is found in evil."
The only true happiness is that which is found in evil.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"I have never done anything wrong in my life, except to think."
"The greatest joy of all is to be free."
"If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be."
"The true way to live is to be without any laws."
"Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced."
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.