Marquis de Sade — "There is no crime that does not contain a certain amount of pleasure."
There is no crime that does not contain a certain amount of pleasure.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?"
"I prefer the madness of passion to the wisdom of indifference."
"The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do."
"Nature has granted me a temperament that is too ardent, a soul too impetuous, a character too strong, for me to be able to submit to the yoke of any laws."
"Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition."
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.