87 Quotes by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Man desires, woman is desired.

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.

A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly.

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.

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.

I am never angry at anything that is natural –.

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.

Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers everything, because it must.

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