Marquis de Sade — "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"What are all the pleasures of the senses compared to the infinite joys of the spirit?"
"The imagination is the most marvelous of all the senses."
"My only regret is that I was born into a world of cowards, who tremble at the sight of truth."
"And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?"
"Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power."
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.