One of the favourite expressions of the famous American actress Bette Davis was that "Sex is God's joke on human beings». And in fact sometimes it looks like that, if we take into account the foolish opinions over the matter. They are so divergent and extreme that there really seems to exist a superior and humorous being behind sex.
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex: you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did. James Baldwin, American writer, Collected Essays
The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral George Santayana, 1863-1952, American philosopher, Reason and Religion
Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty? George Santayana, 1863-1952, American philosopher, The Sense of Beauty
Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty? George Santayana, 1863-1952, American philosopher, The Sense of Beauty
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956, American Journalist, Mencken Chrestomathy
We desire not this particular woman, who is real, but the possession of her, which is not.André Comte-Sponville, French philosopher, A short Treatise on the Great Virtues
In our weakness we can face the question literally, and admit that God has indeed something to do with our sexual life and values. There are people who directly and anxiously appeal for divine intervention in their sexual lives.
Listen to Saint Augustine praying: «God, give me chastity and continence - but not just now». To Saint Augustine, «to love and to be loved was the sweetest thing, mainly if he could enjoy the body of the loved creature ». He didn’t admit the loss of sexual love.
And yet look at what the same Saint Augustine wrote some years later:
Listen to Saint Augustine praying: «God, give me chastity and continence - but not just now». To Saint Augustine, «to love and to be loved was the sweetest thing, mainly if he could enjoy the body of the loved creature ». He didn’t admit the loss of sexual love.
And yet look at what the same Saint Augustine wrote some years later:
Release me, my Lord, of the enticement of concupiscence, so that my soul may follow You without rebellion even in the sleep. So that, infected by bestial images, I do not engage myself in the degrading torpidity of carnal lasciviousness, and not admit it.
We are indeed contradictory beings, and sex is undoubtedly at the heart of many of our contradictions.
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