The person who doesn't know how to subjugate will all too quickly feel the other's foot on the nape of his neck.

Love knows no virtue, no merit; it loves and forgives and tolerates everything because it must. We are not guided by reason.

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

People who want to live like Olympian gods must have slaves whom they throw into their fishponds and gladiators who fight during their masters sumptuous banquets-and the pleasure-seekers never care if some blood splatters on them.

I 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.

Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman. It is only man's egoism that 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.

Desire followed the glance, pleasure followed desire