Marquis de Sade — "I prefer the madness of passion to the wisdom of indifference."
I prefer the madness of passion to the wisdom of indifference.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior?"
"The greatest pleasure of life is love; the greatest luxury is being able to love."
"My only crime is to have been too daring in my thoughts."
"The more perverse a pleasure, the more refined it is."
"My only regret is that I was born into a world of cowards, who tremble at the sight of truth."
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.