"And do you not believe a woman can love?" ...
"I believe it, although it sometimes seems the contrary. Place yourself at the mouth of a cave, and utter a cry within it; the echo will repeat it six or seven times. But is the cry yours, or the cave's? Yours. It seems as if other voices replied to you, but you are deceived, for all these voices are one and the same thing as your own voice. So when you say to a woman:—I love you,—she will reply:—I love you, love you, love you;—but woe to you if you believe she said it by herself; it was the echo of your own voice, and woe to you if you fall in love with your own voice as Narcissus did with his own face...."
"Listen, Titta, I am young and of little experience; but I can see that your heart bleeds, perhaps from some deserved wound: you have not been loved, or have been betrayed; but have you ever loved?"
"I speak philosophically, without reference to myself. What I tell you is natural, and cannot be otherwise. Inconstancy is a fruit of youth like the fragrant red strawberry of spring; constancy is a fruit of mature age like the medlar of autumn;—therefore in woman virtue may be called the medlar of life! All beautiful things seem splendid in variety. Look at the rainbow, look at the dove's neck in the sunlight, look at the peacock's tail. Why do bees make sweet honey and wax? Because they fly from flower to flower. Women are moved by the same impulse as the bees. We are stupid creatures, to think of taking a soul and shutting it up in a cage like a bird, or nailing it down as a money changer does a ducat on his counter; even more cruel than stupid, after we are dead, we thrust a bony arm from the grave and presume to hold a poor woman by the hair. If she will keep herself a good widow,—the will says,—she shall have so much; if not, nothing;—very bad ideas in bad words; because we are dead, shall not others enjoy life?"
"All this would be very well, if life was a book, that we close on coming to the conclusion, and put away to see no more; but as we must think to meet again in the valley of Jehosaphat, if one's wife has had another husband, or even two, which will she have? With which shall she live to all eternity?"
"With the one she likes best; and there is no use to fret about that, since all shall have their turn; all shall be satisfied, if you only think of the length of eternity in women, which I have been assured by people worthy of belief, lasts all one week and sometimes a little over the next Monday."
"Go, go, you will die despairing, since you deny love.—Love, the sweetest union of spirits, two souls joined in one, redoubling strength and help, nourished by mutual sacrifices like the violet on dew."
"Nonsense, my boy, nonsense; love is an instinct of rapine, the agony of power, and the tenacity of possession. The love for a woman is like the love of property. Time was, but a time very, very distant, according to all accounts even before Adam, in which mine and thine meant nothing on the tongues of men; a traveller seeing a ripe fruit hanging from a tree, plucked and ate it. But one night certain envious men met together, and digging a pit around some land more fertile than the rest, said in the morning: no one shall pass beyond this pit, for the land here is our property.—People did not care though, and did the same as before. Then these envious men planted a stone on the limits, and threatened evil to whomsoever should dare to pass it. 'Twas of no more use than before; the excluded men looked upon it as a joke. Finally they put an axe upon the stone, and said: Whosoever passes beyond now, shall die.—But the excluded men laughed still more at this buffoonery and passed over; the others, however, lay in ambush, took them, and murdered them. Then the women wept, children cried, and property entered into the minds of men because they had cut off the heads of others."
"Pardon me, but where did you find all this nonsense? However bad it may be, it is not flour from your bag."
"Indeed it is not: if you could only have been so fortunate as to have heard it as I did from the lips of that great philosopher, that divine...."