Sex from the Sages

down through the ages, the famous have talked and written about it--here are some samples from quotable notables

The Substance of our Lives is woman. All other things are irrelevancies, hypocrisies, subterfuges. We sit talking of sport and politics, and all the while our hearts are filled with memories of women and the capture of women.

--George Moore

Sex and sexuality never made anyone ill and never made anyone feel guilty. It is the hate and destructiveness concealed in them which produce strange aberrations and bitter regret.

--Dr. Karl Menninger

I don't know what I am, dahling. I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either a stiff neck or lockjaw.

--Tallulah Bankhead

No more about sex, it's too boring. Everyone's got one. Nastiness is a real stimulant, though--but poor honest sex, like dying, should be a private matter.

--Lawrence Durrell

Someday, perhaps, a new moral reformer, a great apostle of purity, will appear among us, having his scourge in his hand, and enter our theaters and music halls to purge them. It is not nakedness he will chase out; it will more likely be clothes.

--Havelock Ellis

Sex is a momentary itch, Love never lets you go.

--Kingsley Amis

The late British Home Secretary, who prides himself on being a very sincere Puritan, gray, (continued on page 344)Sage Sex(continued from page 203) gray in every fiber, said with indignant sorrow in one of his outbursts on improper books: "And these two young people, who had been perfectly pure up till that time, after reading this book went and had sexual intercourse together!!!" One up to them! is all we can answer.

--D. H. Lawrence

Lust is nature's free gift to us all, and the hours of its consummation are beyond all measure the most real and ecstatic hours of our life.

--Llewelyn Powys

He [Homo sapiens] is proud that he has the biggest brain of all the primates, but attempts to conceal the fact that he also has the biggest penis.

--Desmond Morris

What's the matter with you girls from Smith is raw virginity.

--Gertrude Stein

Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love.

--Sigmund Freud

The chariest maid is prodigal enough, If she unmask her beauty to the moon.

--Shakespeare

We swear to her that she is an angel and prove to her that she is a beast.

--Paul Geraldy

You should have just so much disgust for your husband as may be sufficient to make you relish your lover.

--William Congreve

Bed is the poor man's opera.

--Italian Proverb

No, no; for my virginity,When I lose that, says Rose, I'll.die.Behind the elms last night, cried Dick,Rose, were you not extremely sick?

--Matthew Prior

I still have a diary entry, written a few days later, asking myself whether talk about the size of the male organ isn't a homosexual preoccupation: If things aren't too bad in other ways, I doubt if any woman cares very much.

--Lillian Hellman

The reason why the bosom of a beautiful woman is an object of such peculiar delight rises from hence: that all our first pleasurable sensations of warmth, sustenance and repose are derived from this interesting source.

--C. C. Colton

Chloë's the wonder of her sex,'Tis well her heart is tender:How might such killing eyes perplex,With virtue to defend her!

But Nature, graciously inclinedWith liberal hand to please us,Has to her boundless beauty joinedA boundless bent to ease us.

--Lord Lansdowne

Madame de Genlis, to avoid the scandal of coquetry, always yielded easily.

--Talleyrand

Girls generally speak very harshly about bashful men, and yet they secretly like them. A little embarrassment always flatters a young girl's vanity, she feels her superiority, it is earnest money. When you have lulled them to sleep, when they believe that you are ready to die from embarrassment, then you have an opportunity to show that you are very far from that, that you are well able to shift for yourself.

--Soren Kierkegaard

A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation. It takes an abundance of imagination, to be sure.

--Karl Kraus

The possibility of being seen, watched, discovered can be more exciting than the actual presence of an audience. Anyone who has ever fucked in the warm sunlight of a (seemingly) secluded beach, or within earshot but out of sight of others, must admit the added excitement which the imminence of an audience brings to an already fine fuck ... or she's a liar.

--Nancy Friday

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition: It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.

--Sir Thomas Browne

Eros is the first, the creator, the principle from which all things proceed. The relation of the sexes ... is really the invisible central point of all action and conduct, and peeps out everywhere in spite of all veils thrown over it.

--Arthur Schopenhauer

I love football. I really love football. As far as I'm concerned, it's the second best thing in the world.

--Joe Namath

If strict monogamy is the height of all virtue, then the palm goes to the tapeworm, which has a complete set of male and female sexual organs in each of its 50-200 proglottids or sections and spends its whole life copulating in all its sections with itself.

--Friedrich Engels

Since having children, I'm much looser at touching people I like. But I can't excite myself over the thought of sex with women. For one thing, there aren't enough parts.

--Hortense Calisher

What saves the virtue of many women is that protecting god, the impossible.

--Honore De Balzac

The Devil, having nothing else todo,Went off to tempt my Lady Poltagrue.My Lady, tempted by a private whim, To his extreme annoyance, tempted him.

--Hilaire Belloc

The degree and essential nature of any human being's sexuality extend into the highest pinnacle of his spirit.

--Friedrich Nietzsche

In hotel bedrooms I learned to call people toi, and I learned a vast, all-embracing kindness for men--men sweating or coughing, handsome or ugly, sunburnt or pale, who all smoked after they had made love. The time of shady hotels with their creaking lifts and dangling wallpaper is past, but I have never forgotten that kindness.

--Francoise Mallet-Joris

Women cannot help moving, and men cannot help being moved.

--Anthony Burgess

But it is in periods of sexual deprivation--to which the young and the old are far more subject than those in their prime--that males, at any rate, are likely to reap psychological benefit from pornography. Am I mistaken, or have I read somewhere that geriatricians occasionally prescribe the reading of it to their patients? At any rate, it seems to be axiomatic that most of those who have lost all interest in sex have also lost interest in living.

--Vivian Mercier

If sex were all, then every tremblinghandCould make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

--Wallace Stevens

Nothing which human beings do to give or receive physical pleasure with each other is unnatural. I find all uses of the flesh except the infliction of cruelty or harm an affirmation of life, and pity men and women who lack the curiosity to explore them.

--Marya Mannes

There used to be societies for the protection of young girls. They are no longer necessary. Women can take care of themselves, and the societies could do well to reverse their aims and set out to protect young men from girls....Women have become the Don Juans.

--C. G. Jung

It is better to be silent than to say things at the wrong time that are too tender; what was appropriate ten seconds ago is so no longer, and hurts one's cause, rather than helps it.

--Stendhal

Sex has been with us since the human race began its existence, yet I would estimate that 90 percent of human beings still suffer from enormous inhibitions in this area.

--Xaviera Hollander

I liked sexual intercourse because of its amazing power of producing a celestial flood of emotion and exaltation of existence which, however momentary, gave me a sample of what one day may be the normal state of being for mankind in intellectual ecstasy.

--George Bernard Shaw