A real apple is more beautiful than a painted one, and a live woman is more beautiful than a Venus of stone.

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

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.

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

Above all else I am a dilettante in life.

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

Now her eyes meet mine like green lightning-they are green, these eyes of hers, whose power is so indescribable-green, but as are precious stones, or deep unfathomable mountain lakes.