Venus In Furs Quotes & Sayings

He simply painted the portrait of some aristocratic Mesalina, and was tactful enough to let Cupid hold the mirror in which she tests her majestic allure with cold satisfaction. He looks as though his task were becoming burdensome enough. The picture is painted flattery. Later an 'expert' in the Rococo period baptized the lady with the name of Venus. The furs of the despot in which Titian's fair model wrapped herself, probably more for fear of a cold than out of modesty, have become a symbol of the tyranny and cruelty that constitute woman's essence and her beauty. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

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 becomecommon. To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

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

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. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

My heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The Plastic People of the Universe played 'Venus in Furs' from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay. — Tom Stoppard

Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

You are cold, while you yourself fan flames. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

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, of pungent cruelty. This is a genuinely modern point of view. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

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

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 took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

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. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

I can easily imagine belonging to one man for my entire life, but he would have to be a whole man, a man who would dominate me, who would subjugate me by his inate strength. And every man - I know this very well - as soon as he falls in love becomes weak, pliable, ridiculous. He puts himself into the woman's hands, kneels down before her. The only man whom I could love permanently would be he before whom I should have to kneel. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

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. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Dangerous forces lie within me. You awaken them, and not to your advantage. You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The real comic muse is the one underwhose laughing mask tears roll down. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

I imagine that the goddess of Love has come down from Olympus to visit a mortal. So as not to die of cold in this modern world of ours, she wraps her sublime body in great heavy furs and warms her feet on the prostrate body of her lover. I imagine the favorite of this beautiful despot, who is whipped when his mistress grows tired of kissing him, and whose love only grows more intense the more he is trampled underfoot. I shall call the picture Venus in Furs — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch