Marquis de Sade — "The greatest happiness is to be found in the contemplation of one's own wickedne…"
The greatest happiness is to be found in the contemplation of one's own wickedness.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates."
"Nature has granted me a right to satisfy all my desires."
"The imagination is the most marvelous of all the senses."
"You are afraid of the people unrestrained-how ridiculous!"
"The only way to arrive at the truth is to examine everything, to deny nothing, to reject nothing."
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.