It is merely the egoism of the man, who wants to bury a woman like a treasure. All attempts at using vows, contracts, and holy ceremonies have failed to bring permanence into the most changeable aspect of changeable human existence, namely love.

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through man's passions, nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

You cannot deny that love lasts for only a brief moment, uniting two beings as a single being that is capable of only one thought, one sensation, one will.

Every man--I know this--turns weak, pliant, ridiculous as soon as he's in love.

Every woman has the instinct, the propensity to profit from her charms, and there's a lot to be said for giving oneself without love, without pleasure.

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.

Despite all the progress of civilization, women have remained exactly as they emerged from the hand of Nature.