Marquis de Sade — "The only true pleasure is that which is forbidden."
The only true pleasure is that which is forbidden.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful."
"Crime is the soul of lust."
"The greatest crime is to be born."
"One today, another tomorrow, you've got to be a whore, a whore in body and soul."
"The greatest joy is to commit a crime and get away with it."
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.