Marquis de Sade — "Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex…"
Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"There is no crime that does not contain a certain amount of pleasure."
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness."
"The greatest pleasure is to imagine what is impossible."
"We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves."
"The most delicious of all pleasures is to be in the wrong."
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.