87 Quotes by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

What you call cruel," the goddess of love replied eagerly, "is simply the element of passion and of natural love, which is woman's nature and makes her give herself where she loves, and makes her love everything, that pleases her.

You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood...

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

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.

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 merely the egoism of men, 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. Can you deny that our Christina world is rotting?

I began to grasp the meaning of creation. I saw that death and life were not so much enemies as friendly comrades, not opposites that negate each other, but rather as variations of nature, each flowing out of the other. I felt myself detached from the world. Death no longer seemed terrible to me; indeed, it appeared less so than life. And the more I became submerged in myself, the more everything about me became alive and expressive and touched my soul.

It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure.

My boredom also turned into melancholy, the melancholy that is so peculiar to us Little Russians, a manly yielding to the feeling of necessity. And my boredom was as necessary as sleep and death.