Tao Te Ching
Sex
Plato described the ancient myth of humans in the distant past being perfect, round beings that the gods became jealous of and split into two parts of male and female that are forever looking to rejoin. It's hard to imagine being a round, male/female being; but, it's easy to identify with the intense longings for union that express themselves through history as sex, love, and marriage. Darwin’s insights into the role of sex in natural selection, evolution, and culture can bring a practical understanding to some of our most powerful and confusing emotions. Sex has been a kind of currency that women have used throughout the ages to get what they want—food, affection, wealth, power, fame, security... Unlike money though that grows with time and interest, this particular kind of currency diminishes with age. As John Lennon wrote, “A pretty face will last a year or two, but pretty soon we’ll see what you an do.” And although advances in contraceptive technology have radically transformed the ramifications of sexual encounters, as Seabright concludes in War of the Sexes, “sex is too rooted in deception, exaggeration, and manipulation for us ever to be entirely straightforward about it.”
Quotes (117)
“‘Perseverance furthers,’ for it is perseverance that make the difference between seduction and courtship.”
“Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it... As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.”
“There in the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible–magic to make the sanest man go mad.”
“Do not let any sweet-talking woman beguile your good sense with the fascination of her shape. It's your barn she's after.”
“On soft beds you satisfied your passion and there was no dance, no holy place from which we were absent.”
“Can you float through the universe of your body engulfed in the slippery union of male and female, slide together in molecular embrace and become two cells merging?”
“When young, beware of the desire to fight. When in manhood, beware of sex. When one has grown old, beware of the desire for possessions.”
“In vain have I looked for one whose desire to build up his moral power was as strong as his sexual desire.”
“Zeus and Hera were arguing about who got more pleasure from sex: men or women. To settle the argument, they called for Tiresias, who had lived as both. Tiresias took the side of Zeus, saying that women’s pleasure was greater, and Hera, in her fury, turned him blind.”
“There was a time when male and female were one but God cut them into two and each became a half-shadow always searching for the other half. This desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”
“There are three things which are unfilial and the greatest of them is to have no posterity.”
“The Tao begins in the relation between man and woman, ends in the infinite vastness of the universe.”
“The harp playing of Xanthippe and her talk, her expressive eyes and her song — and the fire within her just now beginning; these, my soul, will inflame you. The reasons why or whence or how I do not know; but you will know, ill-fated soul, that you are burning.”
“If a woman calls you to sleep with her and you do not go, you are damned. God does not forgive this. You'll be placed with Judas at the very bottom of hell.”
“It's easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net whose cords and knots are strong; but even so, enmeshed, entangled, you can still get out unless, poor fool, you stand in your own way.”
“Cause the savage works of war to be lulled to rest vanquished by the never-healing wound of love”
“Ah, merciless Love, is there any length to which you cannot force the human heart to go?”
“Hurry to your goal together. That is full bliss when man and woman lie equally conquered.”
“If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they a found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman 50 shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife.”
“mists fumed up and overcast my heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness of love, from the fog of lustfulness.”
“My fair girl will be drunken soon with her blushed cheeks… it cheats us and steals away. Rise and dance! The sun is fading!”
“The visions you experience have no reality outside your consciousness—no need to become attracted to the beautiful, repulsed by the frightening, or seduced by the sexual ones.”
“From moment then to moment their desire
Gained strength, and wisdom fled before love's fire;
Passion engulfed them, and these lovers lay
Entwined together till the break of day.”
“I value the lover's sighs of happiness and I despise the hypocrite mumbling his prayers.”
“The desire in the female for the male is so that they may perfect each other's work... they appear to be opposites but the truth they serve is one, each desiring the other for the perfection of their work.”
“Verily, the roots of passion are deep, and remote its sources. It can hardly be uprooted, and young and old, wise and foolish are alike its slaves.”
“There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.”
“Heaven would indeed be heaven if lovers were there permitted as much enjoyment as they had experienced on earth.”
“Now lets get down to the real reason why we sit together and breathe
And begin the laughing, the divine laughing, like great heroic women and magnificent strong men.”
“But I can say for certain, it's no lie,
God made us all to wax and multiply.
Take King Solomon of long ago;
We hear he had a thousand wives or so.
And would to God it were allowed to me
Te be refreshed, aye, half so much as he!”
“I want you to have this: all the beauty in my eyes, and the grace of my mouth, all the splendor of my strength, all the wonder of the musk parts of my body, for are we not talking about real love, real love?”
“Love in young men for the most part is not love but sexual desire, and its accomplishment is the end.”
“Virginity, by being once lost, may be ten times found: by being ever kept, it is ever lost. ’Tis too cold a companion: away with it!”
“Pass a few pleasant hours with a 'cloud sprite on the magic mountain' in her pleasure house with its narrow passages and spacious halls in the sanctum of her flower-temple.”
“in her arms I enjoyed the delights of Paradise which have produced the tortures of Hell by which you see I am devoured”
“I unhappily lost my honor by trusting to his; for he got me with child, and then forsook me... if you, gentlemen, must be making laws, do not turn natural and useful actions into crimes by your prohibitions... and therefore ought, instead of a whipping, to have a statue erected to my memory. [ This fictional speech was so effective, Polly was not only acquitted but the judge married her. ]”
“Wine and sex distract from reality, the lure of wealth deranges our nature, emotions and desires arise in a tangle and we become lost in confusion.”
“If they hastily seek consummation and merely attain a moment's pleasure; not only will the woman not be happy, neither will the man and the relationship will surely fail in the long run.”
“So, lively brisk old fellow, don't let age get you down. White hair or not, you can still be a lover.”
“The relation of the sexes is really the invisible and central point of all action and conduct... the cause of war and the end of peace; the basis of what is serious, the key to all illusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints.”
“Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.”
“Sexual desire—especially when concentrated with fixated infatuation on a particular person—becomes the quintessence of this world's delusion because it promises so excessively much and delivers so miserably little.”
“Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment that a hermit's fast.”
“Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.”
“The magnet embraces the iron, the animals come together by the difference of sex... Man alone speaks with distrust, irony, and shame of the miracle which takes place simultaneously in his soul and his body. This separation of the spirit from the flesh has necesssitated convents and brothels.”
“Of all the causes that have led to the differences in external appearance between the races of man—and to a certain extent between man and the lower animals—sexual selection has been the most efficient.”
“Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”
“Now would all the waves be women, then I'd go drown and chase with them evermore! There's naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.”
“Young love-making—that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whence its subtle interfacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.”
“The human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys—yet he has left it out of his heaven.”
“Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet and, if no obstacles intervene, he moves toward her by as straight a line as they. But if a wall be built between them, they do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides.”
“Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually toward another... What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty.”
“Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable.”
“I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.”
“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”
“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.”
“it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure.... But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory.”
“It is a widespread error to imagine that I do not see the value of sexuality... Sexuality is of the greatest importance as the expression of the chthonic spirit. That spirit is the 'other face of God,' the dark side of the God-image.”
“after a celebration of love the lovers should not part without admiring each other, without being conquered or having conquered, so that neither is bleak or glutted or has the bad feeling of being used or misused.”
“Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.”
“my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”
“wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores… I was a Flower of the mountains yes… and how he kissed me… and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes… and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his hear twas going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
“Christianity soiled the union of man and woman by stigmatizing it as a sin. Whereas formerly it was a holy act, a joyous submission to God's will, in the Christian's terror-shaken soul it degenerated into a transgression. Before Christ, sex was a red apple; along came Christ, and a worm entered that apple and began to eat it.”
“Love—unknown to primitive men, or only as a hunger of the flesh—has flowered into a magnificent garden of song and sentiment, in which the passion of a man for a maid, though vigorously rooted in physical need, rises like incense into the realm of living poetry.”
“Prostitution has been perennial and universal, from the state-regulated brothels of Assyria to the 'night-clubs' of Western European and American cities today.”
“Love generated by physical attraction of boy and girl is an accident of hormones and propinquity; to found a lasting marriage upon such a haphazard and transitory condition is ridiculous.”
“In some existing tribes and probably in the earliest human groups, the physiological role of the male in reproduction appears to have escaped notice quite as completely as among animals who rut and mate and breed with happy unconsciousness of cause and effect.”
“Whitman became really entertaining, when he tried to connect democracy with sex... In a mental daze, he thought of the words 'love' and 'friendship' and 'brotherhood,' which should be the strong bond of a democracy... Here the words 'love' and friendship' became confused or rather fused with the 'fierce affection' of sex.”
“All women’s dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unedited desire to undress.”
“Let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.”
“You can take your choice between God and Sex. If you choose both, you're a hypocrite; if neither, you get nothing.”
“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”
“There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account”
“If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we’ll marry the wrong person.”
“Making love with you
Is like drinking sea water.
The more I drink
The thirstier I become,
Until nothing can slake my thirst
But to drink the entire sea.”
“I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.”
“My wife loves me; ‘O what joys behind hibiscus curtains!’ My wife has left me; how peaceful it is now. Old Wang has a delicious concubine I have a charming blue-eyed cat.”
“the erotic is deeper than the genital. Beyond the play of the penis in the vagina lies the play of the organism in its environment—the polymorphous eroticism of man's original body”
“if we think of spirituality... as including an intense awareness of the inner identity of subject and object, of man and the universe... sexuality... would naturally become one of the chief spheres of spiritual insight and growth.”
“I think I'd have found out a lot sooner if we hadn't necked so damn much. My big trouble is, I always sort of think whoever I'm necking is a pretty intelligent person. It hasn't got a goddam thing to do with it, but I keep thinking it anyway.”
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
“Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?”
“[Discussions about] gender bring us right up face-to-face with sex, as well as love… the functioning of society and the conditions of freedom.”
“Without your love it's a honky tonk parade, without your love it's a melody played in a penny arcade.”
“The same qualities that make someone attractive to the opposite sex and easy to start up a new relationship make it more difficult for that relationship to last.”
“Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling”
“Love is the answer. But while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”
“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV, and you think you're so clever and classless and free… A working class hero is something to be.”
“Why has sex become so important to us?... the myth of salvation through romance arose just as the prevalent Christian myth began to decline”
“Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.”
“To embrace simplicity is to delight in household activities, caring for loved ones, enjoying the sexual company of a partner, nourishing the body, and freeing the mind from anxiety and negativity.”
“when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don't forget this: I loved what I saw... what aggravates them is I've never shed one solitary tear... as we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.”
“I am one of those women who love sex... something women are still not supposed to admit in polite society... some women love sex more than they love love, some love love more than they love sex, some love them both at once... then there are women who would rather stay at home any day and read a book instead”
“In one experiment, 3/4 of the men approached by an unknown woman on a college campus agreed to have sex with her, whereas none of the women approached by an unknown man were willing.”
“The choice [between monogamy and polygyny] isn’t between equality and inequality. It’s between equality among men and equality among women.”
“Sex is about danger as well as about tenderness: the two are inseparable, and they are what has made us such a tender and dangerous species.”
“there is a startling discrepancy between the vast amounts of time and energy [we] devote to thinking, talking, and agonizing about sex and the microscopic amounts of time and energy we devote to actually engaging in it.”
“Anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly… the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state”
“When struck by the desire arrow, all our common sense… go out the window, we… might even find a streetwalking hippopotamus sexy, even as a beautiful girl loyally waits at home.”
“men think about sex on average 34 times a day compared to 19 times for women— There may be no more intense or electrifying way of feeling fully alive than experiencing that most remarkable evolutionary gift: the orgasm.”
“In 1532, the Holy Roman Emperor introduced a penal code that banned the use of contraceptive devices. The message was clear: you can no longer have sex for the fun of it. Half a millennium later, this kind of thinking remains at the root of the Catholic Church's official opposition to birth control”
“I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage — which no previous society has ever believed.”
“Men need to get laid. For women it's less of a 'must' and more of a 'might be nice' or a 'possibly.' We can't win. If we don't play the game, we're frigid or we can't get a man. If we play the game too much, we're a slut, the village bike, damaged goods... patriarchy is a stitch-up.”
“Why, he wondered, do Normals get so worked up about who's having sex with whom? Surely people who want to sleep with each other will do so, until one or both no longer want it. Then it ends. Like the end of the mating season in the animal kingdom. If everyone just accepted that, there would be no more heartache.”
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