Leopold von Sacher-Masoch Quotes - Page 2

Woman, as Nature has created her and as she is currently reared by man, is his enemy and can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. She will be able to become his companion only when she has the same rights as he, when she is his equal in education and work.

Now her eyes meet mine like green lightning-they are green, these eyes of hers, whose power is so indescribable-green, but as are precious stones, or deep unfathomable mountain lakes.

Man desires, woman is desired.

You are cold, while you yourself fan flames.

I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile.

Once I no longer exist as I am, out of what consideration then should I forgo anything? Should I belong to a man I don't love simply because I used to love him? No, I forgo nothing, I love any man who appeals to me and I make any man who loves me happy. Is that ugly? No, it is at least far more beautiful than my cruelly delighting in the tortures incited by my charms and my virtuously turning my back on the poor man who pines away for me. I am young, rich, and beautiful, and just as I am, I live cheerfully for pleasure and enjoyment.

The true comic muse is the one with tears running down under her laughing mask.

Every man--I know this--turns weak, pliant, ridiculous as soon as he's in love.

Why become well-versed in science and the arts if not to impress a lovely little woman?

Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber.

Despite all the progress of civilization, women have remained exactly as they emerged from the hand of Nature.

You cannot deny that love lasts for only a brief moment, uniting two beings as a single being that is capable of only one thought, one sensation, one will.

Above all else I am a dilettante in life.

The struggle of the spirit against the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not wish to have any part in it.

Watch out, I have a large, very large fur, with which I could cover you up entirely, and I have a mind to catch you in it as in a net.

Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad.

So,” Wanda cried, “a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?

Every woman has the instinct, the propensity to profit from her charms, and there's a lot to be said for giving oneself without love, without pleasure.

My heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.

Until then I had lived as I had painted and versified - that is, I never got far beyond priming canvas, beyond penning an outline, a first act, a first stanza. There are simply people who start all sorts of things and yet never finish any of them. And that was the kind of person I was.