quotations about sex
As a person, therefore, would have no enjoyment of drinking, if he had not previously known thirst, so he who is unacquainted with the longings of love has no experience of the most ravishing pleasures.
XENOPHON
Hiero
Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally satisfied.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
Yet this desire will never find full satisfaction outside the God-designed safeguards of entering into the commitment and covenant of marriage and approaching sex as the route to oneness, rather than orgasm. When we remove those safeguards, having sex is like taking the hard drive out of a computer, laying it on a table, and expecting the hard drive to accomplish the role it was created for. By itself, it won'd do you any good.
TIM ALAN GARDNER
The Naked Soul
The imagination of a eunuch dwells more and longer upon the material of love than that of man or woman ... supplying, so far as he can, by speculation, the place of pleasures he can no longer enjoy.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
journal, April 4, 1831
If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
The attempt to possess a woman through an act of sex is as frustrating as trying to possess the scent of a rose by cooking and eating it.
COLIN WILSON
The Corpse Garden
I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late, start without me.
TALLULAH BANKHEAD
Tallulah, Darling
Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they have sexual business with them? Who else are you enchanted by? Nobody.
PHILIP ROTH
The Dying Animal
There is a no man's land between sex and love, and it alters in the night. We go to sleep convinced we are in one state, we awaken in the other, and murderous emotions patrol the ever-changing border.
NORMAN MAILER
The Deer Park
If there is a true secret to the universe, it is this ... these first few seconds of warmth and entry and complete acceptance by one's beloved.
DAN SIMMONS
The Rise of Endymion
The necessity of perpetuating the species, forms the combining principle between males and females; a principle independent of choice or design, and alike incident to animals and to plants, which are all naturally impelled to propagate their respective kinds.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Sex between a man and a woman can be wonderful, provided you can get between the right man and the right woman.
WOODY ALLEN
attributed, The Seven Deadly Sins: A Companion
An intelligent couple can read their Darwin and know that the ultimate reason for their sexual urges is procreation. They know that the woman cannot conceive because she is on the pill. Yet they find that their sexual desire is in no way diminished by the knowledge. Sexual desire is sexual desire and its force, in an individual's psychology, is independent of the ultimate Darwinian pressure that drove it. It is a strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale.
RICHARD DAWKINS
The God Delusion
Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.
JOHN BARRYMORE
attributed, The Quotable Intellectual: 1,417 Bon Mots, Ripostes, and Witticisms for Aspiring Academics, Armchair Philosophers ... And Anyone Else Who Wants to Sound Really Smart
Each night ought to have its menu.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
I'm not saying sex is our divinity. Please. Only that sex is the one secret we have that approximates an exalted state and that we share, two people share wordlessly more or less and equally more or less, and this makes it powerful and mysterious and worth sheltering.... Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it's the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that's equal to others or better, even, that you don't have to go to college six years to get. And it's not religion and it's not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
Sex is God's joke on human beings.
BETTE DAVIS
attributed, Let's Talk about Sex: More Than 600 Quotes on the World's Oldest Obsession
I have always found the most vociferous guardians of morality on matters of sex are those who aren't getting any.
M.C. BEATON
Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came
If sex is supposed to be satisfying and anxiety-free once we are safely ensconced in marriage, how come that's when many of us stop wanting it?
DAVID MORRIS SCHNARCH
Passionate Marriage
It isn't premarital sex if you have no intention of getting married.
ANONYMOUS