Leopold von Sacher-Masoch > Quotes

“You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood...”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Love knows no virtue, no merit; it loves and forgives and tolerates everything because it must. We are not guided by reason...”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“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.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“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.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

“Desire followed the glance, pleasure followed desire”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“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?”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“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.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

“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”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“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.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Wer sich peitschen läßt,
verdient, gepeitscht zu werden.

Who lets itself whip, earned to be whipped.”
― 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.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“So,” Wanda cried, “a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Why become well-versed in science and the arts if not to impress a lovely little woman?”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“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.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Above all else I am a dilettante in life.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Alas, woman is faithful as long as she loves, but you demand that she be faithful without love and give herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel then, woman or man?”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Be then my slave, and know what it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

“Work on.
" Work as if every time you started with and every time you finish.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

“The struggle of the spirit against the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not wish to have any part in it.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs