You view love and especially women... as something hostile, something against which you defend yourself, although in vain, something whose power over you, however, you feel as a sweet torment, a prickling cruelty: this is truly a modern attitude.

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.

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

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.

You were careless enough to leave me the choice. I choose therefore that you shall be my slave, and I shall make a toy out of you.

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.

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

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

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.

I am never angry at anything that is natural –.