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Quote by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

“Oh, keep your warnings and your fears for those giddy women who call themselves women of feeling, whose heated imaginations persuade them that nature has placed their senses in their heads; who, having never thought about it, invariably confuse love with a lover; who, with their stupid delusions, imagine that the man with whom they have found pleasure is pleasure's only source; and, like all the superstitious, accord that faith and respect to the priest which is due to only the divinity.”

Quote by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Work

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Written by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, this novel is a series of letters that depict the intricate web of affairs and manipulations among the aristocracy of 18th-century France. more

Author

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (October 18, 1741 – September 5, 1803) was a French novelist and army officer, best known for his epistolary novel 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses' (Dangerous Liaisons). Born into a noble family, he served in the French military, participating in the American Revolutionary War. His novel, a critique of aristocratic morality and manipulation, became a classic of 18th-century literature. Laclos later engaged in politics during the French Revolution, supporting republican ideals, and died in Italy under Napoleon's rule. more

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“... since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thenceforward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same. Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself.”

“In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her. And 50, at an age when it would appear - since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure - that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order, without any foundation in desire. At this time of life a man has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before his passive and astonished heart. We come to its aid; we falsify it by memory and by suggestion; recognising one of its symptoms we recall and recreate the rest.”