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
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:
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.
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