Daily Inspiration Quote by Marquis de Sade

Leave it to de Sade to smuggle a manifesto into a sentence that sounds, at first blush, like enlightened moderation. He doesn’t argue that virtue is secretly vice, or that morality is a sham. He argues something slipperier: happiness isn’t located in moral categories at all. It’s in our appetite for them, our interpretation of them, and the self-authorizing “choice” we make based on our “individual organization” - the body and psyche as fate.

The intent is a jailbreak. De Sade is prying “the good life” away from church and state and handing it to the nervous system. “Vice” and “virtue” become raw materials, not commandments, and the decisive moral act is aesthetic: how we “appreciate” each, how we metabolize pleasure and restraint. That verb is doing the heavy lifting. Appreciation implies taste, cultivation, even connoisseurship - a language of salons and art criticism repurposed to sanitize the scandal of desire.

The subtext is cynically modern: people don’t choose ethics because they’re true; they choose what fits their wiring. Call it early psychological determinism with a libertine grin. The phrase “pursuant to” even mimics legal prose, as if he’s drafting a contract where the self is both defendant and judge.

Context matters: writing in an era when Enlightenment reason promised universal laws of human nature, de Sade weaponizes the same intellectual tools to argue for radical variance. If your “organization” differs, your happiness will too - and moral outrage starts to look like a category error, or worse, a power play.