Courtesans Quotes

• The slot machines sit there like young courtesans, promising pleasures undreamed of, your deepest desires fulfilled, all lusts satiated.

  Frank Scoblete

  Lust, Desire, Machines

  57 Copy quote

• Take up something that you know will never bring you any returns except pleasure-in other words, allow yourself to live the way brilliant eighteenth century courtesans lived. Don't be afraid of having a decorative life, even if all the decorations come from you.

  Perry Brass

  Life, Way, Return

  Perry Brass (1998). “The Lover of My Soul: A Search for Ecstasy and Wisdom”, p.27, Perry Brass

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• By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct.

  Honore de Balzac

  Sacrifice, Men, Instinct

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• If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Women, Literature, Dry

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.8702, Delphi Classics

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• The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

  Mata Hari

  Love, Dance, Art

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• I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.

  Paul Verlaine

  Spring, Army, Fire

  40 Copy quote

• The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture

  Camille Paglia

  Nature, Men, Feminist

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.18, Vintage

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• 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

  Men, Imagination, Way

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (2015). “Venus in Furs”, p.49, Cosimo Classics

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• In the religion of Love the courtesan is a heretic; but the nun is an atheist.

  Richard B. Garnett

  Love, Atheist, Nun

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• The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels; the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid -- these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.

  Polly Adler

  Girl, Jobs, Husband

  17 Copy quote

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

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

  Men, Lasts, Fiber

  Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (2015). “Venus in Furs”, p.49, Cosimo Classics

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• The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.

  Polly Adler

  Girl, Money, Men

  Polly Adler (1953). “A House is Not a Home”, p.337, Univ of Massachusetts Press

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• Public opinion is a courtesan, whom we seek to please without respecting.

  Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

  Public Opinion, Popularity, Please

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• Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.

  Susan Griffin

  Roles, Modern Woman, Virtue

  Susan Griffin (2002). “The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues”, p.17, Broadway Books

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• The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Liberty, Sound, Mouths

  Journal, Feb. 1851

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• If Courtezans and Strumpets were to be prosecuted with as much Rigour as some silly People would have it, what Locks or Bars would be sufficient to preserve the Honour of our Wives and Daughters?

  Bernard de Mandeville

  Daughter, Silly, Wife

  Bernard de Mandeville (1723). “The Fable of the Bees”, p.48, Jazzybee Verlag

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• When prostitution is a crime, the message conveyed is that women who are sexual are "bad," and therefore legitimate victims of sexual assault. Sex becomes a weapon to be used by men.

  Margo St. James

  Sex, Men, Weapons

  20 Copy quote

• There is no more defiant denial of one man's ability to possess one woman exclusively than the prostitute who refuses to redeemed.

  Gail Sheehy

  Men, Denial, Prostitution

  Gail Sheehy (1973). “Hustling: Prostitution in Our Wide Open Society”, New York : Delacorte Press

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• History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

  Amy Waldman

  Japan, People, Novelists

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• It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.

  Mary Renault

  Kings

  Mary Renault (2014). “The Persian Boy: A Novel of Alexander the Great: A Virago Modern Classic”, p.95, Hachette UK

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• The art of war is like the art of the courtesan; indeed they might be called sisters, since both are slaves of desperation.

  Pietro Aretino

  Art, War, Might

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• Laments of an Icarus The paramours of courtesans Are well and satisfied, content. But as for me my limbs are rent Because I clasped the clouds as mine. I owe it to the peerless stars Which flame in the remotest sky That I see only with spent eyes Remembered suns I knew before. In vain I had at heart to find The center and the end of space. Beneath some burning, unknown gaze I feel my very wings unpinned And, burned because I beauty loved, I shall not know the highest bliss, And give my name to the abyss Which waits to claim me as its own.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Stars, Eye, Heart

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• I'll live as a courtesan, not as a woman. I'll embrace any man that comes my way. It's not hard giving your body and not your heart. And I'll take revenge. To all those rich nobles, I'll get revenge for all the pain I received. No...even more. Then I'll get revenge on you, Head Mistress. Breaking my love and making me a courtesan, will not be a good thing for you.

  Hwang Jini

  Pain, Revenge, Drama

  8 Copy quote

• Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Unexpected, Caprice

  Honore de Balzac (2014). “The Elixir of Life”, p.9, The Floating Press

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• I have seen purer liqors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier women courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited.

  Hinton Rowan Helper

  Gun, Knives, San Francisco

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