Venus in Furs quotes

… lying to yourself—I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at present secure for their masters the income of a cabinet minister, or even that of a minor potentate.

Above all else I am a dilettante in life.

Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything.

Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza.

There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything. I am such a one.

But what am I saying?

That, however, does not signify much, for I have seen few beautiful women, or rather few women at all. In love too, I am a dilettante who never got beyond the preparation, the first act.

But why talk in superlatives, as if something that is beautiful could be surpassed?

It is sufficient to say that this Venus is beautiful. 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.

What solemnity! What music round about!

A nightingale sobs. The stars quiver very faintly in the pale-blue glamour.

The meadow seems smooth, like a mirror, like a covering of ice on a pond.

“

The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern man. I do not care to have a share in it.

”

“Let me finish. 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.

Can you deny that our Christian world has given itself over to corruption?”

I don’t believe that I am in love with Wanda; I am sure that at our first meeting, I felt nothing of the lightning-like flashes of passion. But I feel how her extraordinary, really divine beauty is gradually winding magic snares about me.

It isn’t any spiritual sympathy which is growing in me; it is a physical subjection, coming on slowly, but for that reason more absolutely.

I suffer under it more and more each day, and she—she merely smiles.

For ten days I have been with her every hour, except at night. All the time I was allowed to look into her eyes, hold her hands, listen to what she said, accompany her wherever she went.

My love seems to me like a deep, bottomless abyss, into which I subside deeper and deeper. There is nothing now which could save me from it.

This afternoon we were resting on the meadow at the foot of the Venus-statue. I plucked flowers and tossed them into her lap; she wound them into wreaths with which we adorned our goddess.

“Oh, please do,” I cried half-shuddering, half-enraptured. “If the foundation of marriage depends on equality and agreement, it is likewise true that the greatest passions rise out of opposites. We are such opposites, almost enemies.

That is why my love is part hate, part fear.

In such a relation only one can be hammer and the other anvil. I wish to be the anvil. I cannot be happy when I look down upon the woman I love.

We are sitting on Wanda’s little balcony in the mellow fragrant summer night.

A twofold roof is above us, first the green ceiling of climbing-plants, and then the vault of heaven sown with innumerable stars.

The low wailing love-call of a cat rises from the park. I am sitting on footstool at the feet of my divinity, and am telling her of my childhood.

“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.”

The idea of seeing this serious man wholly in my power, actually lying enraptured at my feet, of course, stimulates me—but will this attraction last?

Woman loves a man; she maltreats a slave, and ends by kicking him aside.

”

Wanda had raised herself on her left arm. “I believe,” she said, “that to hold a man permanently, it is vitally important not to be faithful to him.

What honest woman has ever been as devotedly loved as a hetaira?

”

Now I understand Manon l’Escault and the poor chevalier, who, even in the pillory, while she was another man’s mistress, still adored her.

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

It is not our judgment that leads us; it is neither the advantages nor the faults which we discover, that make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us.

The odd part of my situation is that I am like the bear in Lily’s park.

I can escape and don’t want to; I am ready to endure everything as soon as she threatens to set me free.

* * * * *

If only she would use the whip again. There is something uncanny in the kindness with which she treats me.

I seem like a little captive mouse with which a beautiful cat prettily plays. She is ready at any moment to tear it to pieces, and my heart of a mouse threatens to burst.

What are her intentions? What does she purpose to do with me?

Wanda laughed gaily. “I thought you had finished,” she said, “but never mind.

Man was born to suffer, and you in particular.

The martyrs didn’t have any beefsteaks either.”

It is also maintained that death is easier in the South.

I have a vague feeling now that such a thing as beauty without thorn and love of the senses without torment does exist.

Wanda has discovered a delightful little villa and rented it for the winter. It is situated on a charming hill on the left bank of the Arno, opposite the Cascine.

But she did not require me.

No task was required of me; I meant no more to her than a night-lamp, or a revolver which one places under one’s pillow.

* * * * *

“Thanks, I’ll find her now, thanks, thanks very much.” He ran up the steps. I remained standing below, and looked with deep pity on the poor German.

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

* * * * *

I could see her plunge into and rise out of the crystalline water, and the wavelets which she herself raised played about her like tender lovers.

Our nihilistic aesthetician is right when he says: a real apple is more beautiful than a painted one, and a living woman is more beautiful than a Venus of stone.

And when she left the bath, and the silvery drops and the roseate light rippled down her body, I was seized with silent rapture. I wrapped the linen sheets about her, drying her glorious body.

“Are you mad, me—ah, it is unbelievable, me as the Mother of God!” she exclaimed and laughed again. “Wait a moment, I will show you another picture of myself, one that I myself have painted, and you shall copy it.”

Her head appeared in the window, luminous like a flame under the sunlight.

I hurried up the stairs, through the gallery, into the studio.

The painting is marvellously successful. It is a portrait which as far as the likeness goes couldn’t be better, and at the same time it seems to have an ideal quality. The colors glow, are supernatural; almost diabolical, I would call them.

The painter has put all his sufferings, his adoration, and all his execration into the picture.

* * * * *

I handed these lines to the negress, and hastened away as fast as I could go. I arrived at the railway-station all out of breath. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my heart and stopped. I began to weep.

It is humiliating that I want to flee and I can’t.

I turn back—whither?—to her, whom I abhor, and yet, at the same time, adore.

“You have already written that in your letter,” Wanda replied, with a proud shrug of the shoulders. “

A man of brains should never repeat himself.

”

“Try to toss me aside,” I said, jeeringly. “

Some toys are dangerous.

”

I slowly passed through the drawing-room, and then stood before her bedroom door.

Why does my heart beat so? Am I not perfectly happy?

Opening the door softly, I draw back the portiere. Wanda is lying on the ottoman, and does not seem to notice me.

Her hair is interwoven with, and held up by a black velvet ribbon.

A mighty fire is burning in the fire-place, the hanging lamp casts a reddish glow, and the whole room is as if drowned in blood.

“Wanda,” I said at last.

“Only inordinately fond of pleasure,” she replied with a wild sort of humor. “

Pleasure alone lends value to existence; whoever enjoys does not easily part from life, whoever suffers or is needy meets death like a friend.

“But whoever wants to enjoy must take life gaily in the sense of the ancient world; he dare not hesitate to enjoy at the expense of others; he must never feel pity;

He must always remember this, that if they had him in their power, as he has them they would act in exactly the same way, and he would have to pay for their pleasure with his sweat and blood and soul.

That was the world of the ancients: pleasure and cruelty, liberty and slavery went hand in hand.

People who want to live like the gods of Olympus must of necessity have slaves whom they can toss into their fish-ponds, and gladiators who will do battle, the while they banquet, and they must not mind if by chance a bit of blood bespatters …

That was the world of the ancients: pleasure and cruelty, liberty and slavery went hand in hand.

People who want to live like the gods of Olympus must of necessity have slaves whom they can toss into their fish-ponds, and gladiators who will do battle, the while they banquet, and they must not mind if by chance a bit of blood bespatters them.

”