quotations about sex
Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
letter, Letters to a Young Poet, July 16, 1903
The sexual passion is essential to the perfection of the race. It repeats and emphasizes the divine command given by God to our first parents: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." Without it the family would be impossible.
LYMAN ABBOTT
A Study in Human Nature
Love is what makes sex more than masturbation. If there is no love even if you are really with a partner you masturbate with a partner.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
interview, HARDtalk, January 12, 2010
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Copulation is spiritual in essence--or it is merely friendly exercise. On second thought, strike out "merely." Copulation is not "merely"--even when it is just a happy pastime for two strangers. But copulation at its spiritual best is so much more than physical coupling that it is different in kind as well as in degree.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,
All the governments, judges, gods.
WALT WHITMAN
"A Woman Waits for Me"
I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Anything you make forbidden gains sexual attractiveness. Would you be particularly interested in women's breasts if you lived in a society in which they were displayed at all times?
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
When she's having sex, no woman remains grandiose.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
The Piano Teacher
She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
The Sunday Philosophy Club
We know that many conditions must be satisfied
If a species is to last and reproduce itself:
First there must be food for it, and then a channel
Through which the genetic particles in the limbs
Can find a way out; and the female must fit the male;
There must be organs which can give mutual pleasure.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Psychic health depends on orgastic potency, i.e., upon the degree to which one can surrender to and experience the climax of excitation in the natural sexual act.... Psychic illnesses are the result of a disturbance of the natural capacity for love.
WILHELM REICH
The Function of the Orgasm
From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that. Yet, strange to say, she is allowed to know much less about her functions as a wife and mother than the ordinary artisan of his trade. It is indecent and filthy for a respectable girl to know anything of the marital relation. Oh, for the inconsistency of respectability, that needs the marraige vow to turn something which is filthy into the purest and most sacred arrangement that none dare question or criticize. Yet that is exactly the attitude of the average upholder of marriage. The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive field--sex. Thus she enters into life-long relations with a man only to find herself shocked, repelled, outraged beyond measure by the most natural and healthy instinct, sex.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Marriage and Love", Anarchism and Other Essays
The storm caused by our god, sex, sends us all to our ruin by the shortest route.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
Lust
Part of the sexual revolution is bringing rationality to sexuality -- because when you don't embrace sexuality in a normal way, you get the twisted kinds, and the kinds that destroy lives.
HUGH HEFNER
interview, NPR, September 6, 2003
The Bible is unfortunately unclear on a long list of moral and social questions and sex is one of them. On the one hand, there are expressions of admiration for the reportedly virgin mother of Jesus, but other portions of scripture speak quite accommodatingly of polygamy.
STEVE ALLEN
Vulgarians at the Gate
Everyone is having sex until they fall in love. When you fall in love, then it's making love.
GILBERT ARENAS
Esquire, April 2010
I've tried several varieties of sex, all of which I hate. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic; the others give me a stiff neck and/or lockjaw.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD
Tallulah, Darling
The best that he had ever managed in bed, so far, had been the maximum of relief with the minimum of hostility.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country