Marquis de Sade — "The only way to be truly virtuous is to be vicious."
The only way to be truly virtuous is to be vicious.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"There is no good or evil, there is only pleasure and pain."
"I have never done anything wrong in my life, except to think."
"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."
"There is a sum of evil equal to the sum of good, the continuing equilibrium of the world requires that there be as many good people as wicked people..."
"First ourselves, then the others: this is Nature's order of progression. Consequently, we must show no respect, no quarter for others as soon as they have shown that our misfortune or our ruin is the …"
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.