Quotes from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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.

Yes, I am cruel—since you take so much delight in that word-and am I not entitled to be so? Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through his passion 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.

Be then my slave, and know what it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman.

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

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

Above all else I am a dilettante in life.

You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.

Above all else I am a dilettante in life.

Pleasure alone makes existence worthwhile. A pleasure-seeker has a difficult time parting from life.

Never feel safe with the woman you love, for a woman's nature conceals more dangers than you think.

Love knows no virtue, no merit; it loves and forgives and tolerates everything because it must. We are not guided by reason.

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.

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.

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.

We are faithful as long as we love, but youdemand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving ofherself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there--woman or man?

Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.

You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.

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

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

Through his passion 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.

I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully,"that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.

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.

Wer sich peitschen läßt, verdient, gepeitscht zu werden. Who lets itself whip, earned to be whipped.

The more devoted a woman shows herself, the sooner the man sobers down and becomes domineering. The more cruelly she treats him and the more faithless she is, the worse she uses him, the more wantonly she plays with him, the less pity she shows him, by so much the more will she increase his desire, be loved, worshipped by him.