Marquis de Sade — "Virtue, for me, is merely a word."
Virtue, for me, is merely a word.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"There are no crimes, there are only actions."
"Even if she was the devil's own daughter, God strike me down if I never have her. May all the devils in hell make off with my soul if he lays a finger on her before I do!"
"There is no crime that does not contain a certain amount of pleasure."
"The only true wisdom is to know that you know nothing."
"We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves."
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.