Marquis de Sade — "The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do."
The greatest pleasure in life is to do what people say you cannot do.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Crimes are always committed for the sake of enjoyment."
"The more I see of men, the more I love dogs."
"How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze – those would be crimes indeed, and not the little e…"
"I have always been convinced that the universe is a place of perpetual motion, and that this motion is always tending towards destruction."
"To be truly free, one must be free from all laws, even those of nature."
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.
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Attributed, often found in collections of his quotes, but direct source difficult to pinpoint.
Date: Late 18th Century
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