Be then my slave, and know what it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman.

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

You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood.

My heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.

The true comic muse is the one with tears running down under her laughing mask.

If I can't enjoy the full and total happiness of love, then I want to drain its torments, its tortures to the dregs; then I want the woman I love to mistreat me, betray me, and the more cruelly the better. That too is a pleasure.

Love 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?