Leopold von Sacher-Masoch Quotes

My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys.

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

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.

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped,deserves to be whipped.

I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile.

Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.

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.

We are faithful as long as we love, but youdemand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving ofherself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there--woman or man?