Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Why would a man need both a wife and a mistress? A smart man would seek out and fall in love with a woman who can play both.

A lover’s soul lives in the body of his mistress.

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

The human face is the organic seat of beauty…. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.

A mistress never is nor can be a friend. While you agree, you are lovers; and when it is over, anything but friends.

Mistress: Something between a mister and a mattress.

Woman is mistress of the art of completely imbittering the life of the person on whom she depends.

Men will bear many things from a kept mistress, which they would not bear from a wife.

The man that thinks he loves his mistress for her own sake is mightily mistaken.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

Take love as a sober man takes wine; do not become a drunkard. If your mistress is sincere and faithful, love her for that; but if she is not, if she is merely young and beautiful, love her for that; if she is agreeable and spirituelle, love her for that; if she is none of these things but merely loves you, love her for that. Love does not come to us every day.

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.

It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.

My teachers always said, “You’re very talented, but don’t set your heart on art. You’re only a girl.” I was inspired by Virginia Woolf in 1960, but they wouldn’t let me write about her. They said she was a trivializer. I also wanted to do a paper on Simone de Beauvoir, and my philosophy teacher said, “Why would you write about the mistress? Write about the master.” That was Sartre.

The more one loves a mistress, the more one is ready to hate her.

Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them.

A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.

Desserts are like mistresses. They are bad for you. So if you are having one, you might as well have two.

No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.

Even a faithful mistress can be bent by constant threats.

Art is a jealous mistress.

Money is a handmaiden, if thou knowest how to use it A mistress, if thou knowest not.

Show me a mistress that is passing fair, what doth her beauty serve but as a note where I may read who pass’d that passing fair?

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

It is a madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because in herself she is nothing, can rule nothing, but is ruled by prudence.

A husband can commit no greater blunder than to discuss his wife, if she is virtuous, with his mistress; unless it be to mention his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife.

For people raised and programmed on the patriarchal religions of today, religions that affect even the most secular aspects of our society, perhaps there remains a lingering, almost innate memory of sacred shrines and temples tended by priestesses who served in the religion of the original supreme deity. In the beginning, people prayed to the Creatress of Life, the Mistress of Heaven. At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember?

Marriage, n: the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.

Woman throughout the ages has been mistress to the law, as man has been its master.

Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world — a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.

Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?

A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the town, not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away.

Next to the pleasure of finding a new mistress is that of being rid of an old one.

When a man marries his mistress it creates a job opportunity.

I will have here but one mistress and no master.

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood

Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.

Now I need to take a piece of wood and make it sound like the railroad track, but I also had to make it beautiful and lovable so that a person playing it would think of it in terms of his mistress, a bartender, his wife, a good psychiatrist – whatever.

Riches are a good hand maiden, but a poor mistress.

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.

Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn’t forbidden.

To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy’s contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses’ doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children — a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.

If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.