Marquis de Sade — "The more atrocious a crime is, the more it flatters one's vanity."
The more atrocious a crime is, the more it flatters one's vanity.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"My philosophy is simple: pleasure is the only good, and pain is the only evil."
"My only pleasure is to do what is forbidden."
"Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced."
"What is crime? What is virtue? All depends on the point of view."
"I preach nothing but pleasure, and I practice what I preach."
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.