Top 70 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Above all else I am a dilettante in life.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

2. “People who want to live like Olympian gods must have slaves whom they throw into their fishponds and gladiators who fight during their masters sumptuous banquets-and the pleasure-seekers never care if some blood splatters on them.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

3. “Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will paint her, and go mad.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

4. “You have corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood...”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

7. “Whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

8. “Alas, woman is faithful as long as she loves, but you demand that she be faithful without love and give herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel then, woman or man?”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

9. “You are cold, while you yourself fan flames.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

10. “Every man – I know this – turns weak, pliant, ridiculous as soon as he’s in love.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

11. “Pleasure alone makes existence worthwhile. A pleasure-seeker has a difficult time parting from life.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

12. “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

13. “Never feel safe with the woman you love, for a woman’s nature conceals more dangers than you think.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

15. “Desire followed the glance, pleasure followed desire.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

16. “Woman, as Nature has created her and as she is currently reared by man, is his enemy and can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. She will be able to become his companion only when she has the same rights as he, when she is his equal in education and work.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

17. “You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

20. “You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

21. “There is no describing the feeling of being mistreated by a successful rival in front of the woman you worship.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

22. “The person who doesn’t know how to subjugate will all too quickly feel the other’s foot on the nape of his neck.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

24. “My heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

25. “You have a curious way of arousing one’s imagination, stimulating all one’s nerves, and making one’s pulses beat faster. You put an aureole on vice, provided only if it is honest. Your ideal is a daring courtesan of genius. Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

26. “If I can’t enjoy the full and total happiness of love, then I want to drain its torments, its tortures to the dregs; then I want the woman I love to mistreat me, betray me, and the more cruelly the better. That too is a pleasure.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

27. “You cannot deny that love lasts for only a brief moment, uniting two beings as a single being that is capable of only one thought, one sensation, one will.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

28. “Why become well-versed in science and the arts if not to impress a lovely little woman?”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

29. “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.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

30. “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.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

31. “Love knows no virtue, no merit; it loves and forgives and tolerates everything because it must. We are not guided by reason, nor do the assets or blemishes that we discover tempt us to devotion or intimidate us. It is a sweet, mournful, mysterious power that drives us, and we stop thinking, feeling, wishing, we let ourselves drift along and never ask where we are drifting.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

32. “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

33. “Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers everything, because it must.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

34. “Man desires, woman is desired.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

35. “Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a woman to her very last fiber.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

36. “Every woman has the instinct, the propensity to profit from her charms, and there’s a lot to be said for giving oneself without love, without pleasure.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

37. “How beautiful you now are,” she exclaimed, “your eyes half-broken in ecstacy fill me with joy, carry me away. How wonderful your look would be if you were being beaten to death, in the extreme agony. You have the eye of a martyr.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

38. “I am never angry at anything that is natural –.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

39. “It is only man’s egoism which 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.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

40. “You were careless enough to leave me the choice. I choose therefore that you shall be my slave, and I shall make a toy out of you.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

41. “Watch out, I have a large, very large fur, with which I could cover you up entirely, and I have a mind to catch you in it as in a net.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

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

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

43. “You view love and especially women... as something hostile, something against which you defend yourself, although in vain, something whose power over you, however, you feel as a sweet torment, a prickling cruelty: this is truly a modern attitude.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

44. “The struggle of the spirit against the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not wish to have any part in it.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

45. “It is only man’s egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

46. “Until then I had lived as I had painted and versified – that is, I never got far beyond priming canvas, beyond penning an outline, a first act, a first stanza. There are simply people who start all sorts of things and yet never finish any of them. And that was the kind of person I was.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

47. “Everything was silent. Only man was awake in his misery, laboring in the sweat of his brow for the sake of this absurd existence that he passionately loves and despises in equal measure.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

48. “The blows, as you see, have agreed with me; the roseate supersensual mist has dissolved, and no one can ever make me believe that these ‘sacred apes of Benares’ or Plato’s rooster are the image of God.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

49. “Olha thought that simply murdering her enemies would not be enough to satisfy herself and her people. A true daughter of her time, she was tireless in inventing inhumane tortures for her victims in an effort to see them tortured to death in front of her.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

50. “The more devoted a woman shows herself, the sooner the man sobers down and becomes domineering. The more cruelly she treats him and the more faithless she is, the worse she uses him, the more wantonly she plays with him, the less pity she shows him, by so much the more will she increase his desire, be loved, worshipped by him.”

— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch