Quotes from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

How beautiful you now are," she exclaimed, "your eyes half-broken in ecstacy fill me with joy, carry me away. How wonderful your look would be if you were being beaten to death, in the extreme agony. You have the eye of a martyr.

She had wrapped her marble-like body in a huge fur, and rolled herself up trembling like a cat.

But why talk in superlatives, as if something that is beautiful could be surpassed?

You are cold, while you yourself fan flames. By all means wrap yourself in your despotic furs, there is no one to whom they are more appropriate, cruel goddess of love and of beauty

The real comic muse is the one underwhose laughing mask tears roll down.

Las grandes pasiones parten de la antítesis.

That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion . This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and wor.

All about us the earth steamed; mists rose up toward heaven like clouds of incense; a shattered rainbow still hovered in the air.

That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work.

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.

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage.

You mean you are now my slave without illusions, and for that reason you shall feel the weight of my foot without mercy.

You of the North in general take love too soberly and seriously. You talk of duties where there should be only a question of pleasure.

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

I feel sorry for him, but I do not love him. I love no one. I used to love you, as ardently, as passionately, as deeply as it was possible for me to love, but now I don't love even you any more; my heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.

It is only man's egoism which wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.

Well you know me Ã¢â'¬â€œ I am a woman of stone, your Venus in Furs, your ideal, so kneel and adore me.

You look at love, and especially woman, as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view.

Nature wants to propogate our race. What else would it want. We, however, are vain and gullible enough to convince ourselves that it has our happiness in mind.

Everything was silent. Only man was awake in his misery, laboring in the sweat of his brow for the sake of this absurd existence that he passionately loves and despises in equal measure.

Place thy foot upon thy slave, Oh thou, half of hell, half of dreams; Among the shadows, dark and grave, Thy extended body softly gleams.

but you cannot deny, that man and woman are mortal enemies, in your serene sunlit world as well as in our foggy one. In love there is union into a single being for a short time only, capable of only one thought, one sensation, one will, in order to be then further disunited. And you know this better than I; whichever of the two fails to subjugate will soon feel the feet of the other on his neck—

The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene sensuousness of the Greeks--pleasure without pain. I do not believe in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a heretic, I am a pagan.

reading the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers into beasts. A wonderful picture of antique love.