Leopold von Sacher-Masoch Quotes
-
My heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.
→ -
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.
→ -
You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors.
→ -
You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.
→ -
So,” Wanda cried, “a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?
→ -
Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad.
→ -
A real apple is more beautiful than a painted one, and a live woman is more beautiful than a Venus of stone.
→ -
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.
→ -
I imagine that the goddess of Love has come down from Olympus to visit a mortal. So as not to die of cold in this modern world of ours, she wraps her sublime body in great heavy furs and warms her feet on the prostrate body of her lover. I imagine the favorite of this beautiful despot, who is whipped when his mistress grows tired of kissing him, and whose love only grows more intense the more he is trampled underfoot. I shall call the picture "Venus in Furs
→ -
It is merely the egoism of the man, who wants to bury a woman like a treasure. All attempts at using vows, contracts, and holy ceremonies have failed to bring permanence into the most changeable aspect of changeable human existence, namely love.
→ -
You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood.
→ -
Why become well-versed in science and the arts if not to impress a lovely little woman?
→ -
There is no describing the feeling of being mistreated by a successful rival in front of the woman you worship.
→ -
My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys.
→ -
Cats exercise... a magic influence upon highly developed men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kingdom, these adorable, scintillating electric batteries have been the favorite animal of a Mohammed, Cardinal Richlieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.
→ -
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.
→ -
Pleasure alone makes existence worthwhile. A pleasure-seeker has a difficult time parting from life.
→ -
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.
→ -
Never feel safe with the woman you love, for a woman's nature conceals more dangers than you think.
→ -
A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly.
→ -
You are cold, while you yourself fan flames.
→ -
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.
→ -
You have a curious way of arousing one's imagination, stimulating all one's nerves, and making one's pulses beat faster. You put an aureole on vice, provided only if it is honest. Your ideal is a daring courtesan of genius. Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber.
→ -
The person who doesn't know how to subjugate will all too quickly feel the other's foot on the nape of his neck.
→ -
Desire followed the glance, pleasure followed desire
→ -
Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through man's passions, nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.
→ -
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.
→ -
Despite all the progress of civilization, women have remained exactly as they emerged from the hand of Nature.
→ -
Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers everything, because it must. It is not our judgment that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults which we discover, that make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us. It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it, and ask not whither?
→
Related Authors
-
Alexandre Desplat Film composer -
-
Wilkie Collins Novelist -
David Ives Playwright -
Mathieu Amalric Film actor -
Roman Polanski Film director -
Giovanni Boccaccio Author -
Henry Miller Writer -
Anais Nin Author -
Emmanuelle Seigner Actress -
Emile Zola Writer -
Nina Arianda Theatre actress -
Marianne Faithfull Singer -
Oscar Wilde Writer -
Marquis de Sade Philosopher -
Alfred de Musset Dramatist -
Georges Bataille Author -
Richard von Krafft-Ebing Psychiatrist -
Gilles Deleuze Philosopher -
George Sand Novelist