You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood.

A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you understand very quickly.

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 know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors.

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

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.