The Book of Love

A human being of a low order or of a simple nature does not feel the energy of that new sentiment called love rise within him until the development of the germinative glands has...

The man who, through fault of the trees he sprang from or through his own, lives on the bestial frontiers of the human kingdom, is like the brute for which love is a desire that...

Arcadians, metaphysicians, and all adorers of the past are cursing every day and every hour the modern mania of comparing human things to living beings and call for anathemas ag...

Love, being the most powerful agitator of human elements that was ever known, stirs the slime which is always found even in the noblest natures; while in men whose souls have be...

In the Apollo room in the Vatican you will see an ancient bas-relief representing two bacchantes with the Dionysian thyrsus; one is standing, while the heat of voluptuousness is...

Pain, so rich in afflictions and tortures, in its varieties as infinite as the grains of sand in the ocean, and as deep as the ocean's abysses, has reserved its greatest bittern...

Whenever I see a flower that opens and shows its cheerful petals on the border of an abyss, the same thought ever recurs to my mind: there is love, which always seems to live be...

A country cannot be surveyed without tracing exactly its boundaries, without following them in their capricious and serpentine lines, without marking the point where its individ...

I shall not repeat in these pages for the hundredth time the criticism of temperaments as they were described by the ancient schools, and which I have expounded in many of my wo...

Since, according to the grammar, adjectives may be either masculine or feminine, it consequently follows that man also can be virgin; but between his and woman's virginity there...

In studying the morning crepuscules of Love, we have involuntarily outlined the first phases of Love. We have seen him timid and spasmodic, exerting himself between the swaddlin...

Thought may, for very different reasons, now be an ally and now a victim of love. First instrument of seduction, next to the external form of the body, thought revives, flares u...

How subtle and mysterious must that high chemistry be which unites the germinative elements of two organisms of different sex to renew life and generate a new organism! It does...

If you ask a hundred women what is the most common fault of love, probably the same reply will be repeated a hundred times: "Love is inconstant; love is a liar." If, on the othe...

"Love me! You must love me!" This is a cry of sorrow that often man utters, and oftener a forsaken woman; but it generally is a vain cry. To demand love as a right is one of the...

Man and woman can love with the same degree of force, but they will never love in the same manner, since to the altar of their passion they carry two greatly different natures b...

Modesty is one of the psychical phenomena the physiological study of which is more difficult because that phenomenon is very indistinct and vague, although prepotent and most ex...

Love is not only a voluptuousness given and returned, the interweaving and untying of instantaneous knots, but a compact between two creatures who, after having given themselves...

If man elevates his loves to the highest spheres of the ideal; if he can be called the most sublime lover on the terrestrial planet, he can boast of having had from nature the l...

Like the butterfly, which, when just emerged from the involucre of the chrysalis, still bears on its folded wings some strips of the wrapping in which it was long enveloped, so...

This chapter may to many readers seem utterly useless in a psychological work, since chastity is a question of hygiene or a negation of love; and in any case, someone could whis...