Top 19 Courtesans Quotes & Sayings

How is it that one woman is…enough…for three men?” “I don’t know.” “She must be a very talented courtesan.” “Callie.” “Well, that was what she was. Wasn’t it?” “Yes.” “How very fascinating!” She smiled brightly. “I’ve never met a courtesan, you know.” “I could have surmised as such.” “She looked just as I imagined they did! Well, she was rather prettier.” Ralston’s eyes darted around the room as though he was looking for the quickest escape route. “Callie. Wouldn’t you rather gamble than talk about courtesans?

Balzac loved courtesans. They were independent women, and in the 19th century, that was a breed that was just evolving.

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.

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

For many courtesans, it was over by age 22.

I have always been drawn to the Restoration period of Charles II. I have a soft spot for Charles Stuart, who was always loving and kind to the opposite sex. The members of his court were fascinating, and Barbara Castlemaine was one of the greatest courtesans in history.

The demi-monde does not represent the crowd of courtesans, but the class of declassed women It is divided from that of honest women by public scandal, and divided from that of the courtesans by money.

For most practical purposes Tarbean had two pieces: Waterside and Hillside. Waterside is where people are poor. That makes them beggars, thieves, and whores. Hillside is where people are rich. That makes them solicitors, politicians, and courtesans.

A fat lot of good it would do if I told you that Titian's courtesans make you want to caress them. Some day you'll see the Titians for yourself, and if they have no effect on you, then you don't understand the first thing about painting. And I wouldn't be able to help you.

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.

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.

I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.

In the mid-1800s, they were known also as 'singsong houses,' and the courtesans were actually master musicians.

I read academic books on courtesan culture at the turn-of-the century in Shanghai such as Gail Hershatter's 'The Gender of Memory'. The diaries were mostly in the form of letters from courtesans to a lover who had disappeared or taken their savings.

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.

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.

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

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

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.