Marquis de Sade — "The greatest beauty is to be found in deformity."
The greatest beauty is to be found in deformity.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Marquis de Sade
"The only happiness we can enjoy is that which we procure for ourselves at the expense of others."
"I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts."
"All universal moral principles are idle fancies."
"It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is thef…"
"Nothing that makes one hard is wicked and the only crime in the world is to refuse oneself that pleasure."
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.