Marquis de Sade — "Crime is the soul of lust."
Crime is the soul of lust.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"I have spent my life in prisons, and I have found the solitude to be a great source of inspiration."
"The greatest pleasure is to cause pain to others."
"No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful."
"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..."
"The greatest pleasure of all is to corrupt others."
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.