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.

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

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

Man desires, woman is desired.

So,” Wanda cried, “a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?

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

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.