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-MasochThe person who doesn't know how to subjugate will all too quickly feel the other's foot on the nape of his neck.
Leopold von Sacher-MasochYou modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.
Leopold von Sacher-MasochI saw sensuality as sacred, indeed the only sacredness, I saw woman and her beauty as divine since her calling is the most important task of existence: the propagation of the species. I saw woman as the personification of nature, as Isis, and man as her priest, her slave; and I pictured her treating him as cruelly as Nature, who, when she no longer needs something that has served her, tosses it away, while her abuses, indeed her killing it, are its lascivious bliss.
Leopold von Sacher-MasochLove 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