Woman’s power lies in man’s passion, and she knows how to use it, if man doesn’t understand himself. He has only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave of woman.

That love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural,...

You look at love, and especially woman, as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture,...

I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile.

She had wrapped her marble-like body in a huge fur, and rolled herself up trembling like a cat.

My husband’s personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he...

You of the North in general take love too soberly and seriously. You talk of duties where there should be only a question of pleasure.

The real comic muse is the one underwhose laughing mask tears roll down.

All about us the earth steamed; mists rose up toward heaven like clouds of incense; a shattered rainbow still hovered in the air.