"Sexual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tight-beamed thought. "You aren't putting out anything about our sexual customs, family life, ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... any gallant deference to female weakness, nor are the females found to perish disproportionately through exhaustion. It is the English experience that among coursing-dogs and race-horses there is no serious sexual inequality. Aelian says that Semiramis did not exult when in the chase she captured a lion, but was proud when she took a lioness, the dangers of the feat being far greater. Hunters as willingly encounter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... p. 357, we find the conclusion arrived at, as it would appear, on the most satisfactory evidence, that "sexual and asexual reproduction are not seen to differ essentially; and . . . . that asexual reproduction, the power of regrowth, and development are all parts of one and the same great law." Does it not then follow, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... hard winter will kill off a weakly child as the bucket kills off a weakly puppy. Then there is the farm laborer. Shakespear's Touchstone, a court-bred fool, was shocked to find in the shepherd a natural philosopher, and opined that he would be damned for the part he took in the sexual selection of sheep. As to the production of new species by the selection of variations, that is no news to your gardener. Now if you are familiar with these three processes: the survival of the fittest, sexual selection, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... undergone the operation." Those uncircumcised at the age of puberty are taunted by their fellows, and such are called "suput," a word formerly meaning "constricted" or "tight," but now being extended to mean "one who cannot easily gain entrance in sexual intercourse." The "operation has no religious significance," nor is it done for cleanliness, "but from custom and disinclination to be ridiculed," probably [as Morga proves] having been learned from the Moros. The friars were unable to check ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... bulk of the Orientals was still beyond the Himalayas and the Gobi, Europe indulged in a wild saturnalia to celebrate its own doom. All pretense of sexual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small illprinted newspapers carried advertisements promising the gratification of strange lusts. A new cult of Priapus sprang up and virgins were ceremoniously deflowered ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Hebrews, or any other nation of antiquity, learnt to abhor slavery, though probably it existed in a milder form at Athens than anywhere else in the old or new world: they were more implacable in revenge and laxer in sexual indulgence than the Christian ethics would allow in theory, though not perhaps much more so than Christendom has shown itself in practice. And though undoubtedly the greatest single impulse ever given to morality came from Palestine, yet the ground which nurtured the seeds of ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... however little we may know of its causes or its process. But this Reformation was no mere re-modelling of the hierarchy. It can be shown that it imposed on the members of the Church a new standard of sexual morality; if we believe contemporary writers, it restored to their proper place such rites as Confession, Confirmation and Matrimony; it substituted for the offices of divine service previously in use those of the Roman Church; it introduced the custom of paying ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... Igorot is closely defined when it is said that marriage never takes place prior to sexual intimacy, and rarely prior to pregnancy. There is one exception. This is when a rich and influential man marries a girl against her desires, but through the ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... is the obvious danger of a reaction, and, guard against it as one may, it exists and sometimes leads to disaster; but there is another danger to which the schoolmaster is then liable, it is the danger of making confirmation an occasion for much talk on sexual difficulties. The existence of these should be faced, but at any time rather than at confirmation, except so far as they occur quite naturally in ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... of slaves, as shown by the census, results from the comparative defect of moral and prudential restraint on the sexual connexion; and from the absence, at the same time, of that counteracting licentiousness of intercourse, of which the worst examples are to be traced where the African trade, as in the West Indies, kept the number of females ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... drew us so closely one to the other, at an age when the sexual sympathies lay dormant in her and ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... the elaborate details of the perilous stages of life's development, this is the method of incubation Nature imposes upon us. Before the birth of a human being, one male and one female—that is, one man and one woman—must have sexual intercourse. Whether this intercourse is prompted by all the finer impulses of life or is accomplished by the savageness of rape makes no difference to Nature's purpose. To Nature the end justifies the means, and she continues to go ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... school or college that does not furnish abundant examples of these sad cases. The more completely any such school or college succeeds, while adopting every detail and method of a boy's school, in ignoring and neglecting the physiological conditions of sexual development, the larger will be the number of these pathological cases among its graduates. Clinical illustrations of these statements will be given ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... as a child a high ideal of manly strength and beauty, the attainment of which must depend upon strict temperance in eating and in the sexual relation, together with severe and persistent exercise. He desired to be a worthy link in the generations, and that he might not destroy by his weakness that vigor and purity of blood which had been achieved at the cost of much self-denial by a ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... hint of that explanation at the end of Marriage, published in 1912. The story, reduced to the barest outline, is that of the relations of Trafford to his wife. It is not complicated by any sexual temptations or jealousies, but it gradually evolves the integral problem of the meaning ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... secret explanation of all such habits is that they offer compensation for some pain and are turned to at such times. What one man seeks in work, another man seeks in religion, another finds in self-flagellation, and still others seek in alcohol, morphine, sexual ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... compliments silence fell. Conversing through interpreters is a benumbing process, and there are few points of contact between the open-air occidental mind and beings imprisoned in a conception of sexual and domestic life based on slave-service and incessant espionage. These languid women on their muslin cushions toil not, neither do they spin. The Moroccan lady knows little of cooking, needlework or any household arts. When her child is ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... the eyes are oblique, and neither the mouth nor the chin are finished. The magnificent collection of the Marquis de Vibraye contains a little figure from Laugerie, representing a nude woman without arms. Thin and stiff, she is chiefly remarkable for the exaggerated size of the sexual organs, and for some peculiar protuberances on the loins. We dwell upon the former peculiarity, because it is so far extremely rare, whereas certain relics of the Greeks and Romans, in spite of the comparatively advanced civilization ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... The sexual epithet fell queerly on the room. Mr. Povey, being a man of the world, behaved as if nothing had happened; but Mrs. Baines's curls protested against this unnecessary coarseness. Constance pretended not to hear. Sophia did not understandingly hear. Mr. Scales had no suspicion ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... terms at Woolwich! I hated the work, the drill, the gym and even the riding school. I hated the officers, and above all I hated the spirit of the place. As far as I remember, the one eternal topic of conversation and subject of "wit" was the sexual relation. Of course the boys had never been taught sensibly anything about it. Consequently the place was continually circulated with filthy books, pictures, stories, etc. When I went there I was extraordinarily innocent, ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... hunting. And they had dancers and mimes and all other things to hear and see which are of a musical nature or otherwise merit attention among men. And the most of them dwelt in parks, which were well supplied with water and trees; and they had great numbers of banquets, and all manner of sexual pleasures were in great vogue among them. But the Moors live in stuffy huts[19] both in winter and in summer and at every other time, never removing from them either because of snow or the heat of the sun or any other discomfort whatever ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... that woman is destitute of desire. Carpenter, the great English scientist, is quoted in support of this proposition, and a "female lecturer of distinction" (name not given) to establish the theory that the chief cause of marital unhappiness and the ill health of wives is the sexual inhumanity of husbands—such inhumanity being quite as common among the better ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... naturally and constantly by self- 549:1 division." This discovery is corroborative of the Science of Mind, for this discovery shows that the multiplication 549:3 of certain animals takes place apart from sexual condi- tions. The supposition that life germinates in eggs and must decay after it has grown to maturity, if not before, 549:6 is shown by divine metaphysics to be a mistake, - a blunder which will finally give place to ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... till our sympathy is lost in incredulity, or the stimulus is sought in unnatural or impossible situations, or in situations that ought to be impossible, (as in the Myrrha or the Cenci,) or the character is enfeebled by a mixture of degrading propensities and sexual weakness, as in Vittoria Corombona. But Lady Macbeth, though so supremely wicked, and so consistently feminine, is still kept aloof from all base alloy. When Shakspeare created a female character purely ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... aged 14: I always work without stockings, shoes, or trowsers. I wear nothing but a shift. I have to go up to the headings with the men. They are all naked there. I am got used to that."—Report on Mines. "As to illicit sexual intercourse it seems to prevail universally, and from an early period of life." "The evidence might have been doubled, which attest the early commencement of sexual and promiscuous intercourse among boys and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... Gloriana, brooding darkly On Mary of Scotland's doom, who now at last Was plucked from out her bosom like a snake Hissing of war with France, a queenly snake, A Lilith in whose lovely gleaming folds And sexual bonds the judgment of mankind Writhes even yet half-strangled, meting out Wild execrations on the maiden Queen Who quenched those jewelled eyes and mixt with dust That white and crimson, who with cold sharp steel ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... beginning of each species the simultaneous origin of a large number of individuals, if the same species may originate at the same time in different localities, these first representatives of each species, at least, were not connected by sexual derivation; and as this applies equally to any first pair, this fancied test criterion of specific identity must at all events be given up, and with it goes also the pretended real existence of the species, in contradistinction from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... proposed the name of Vaucheria for the genus, in commemoration of the meritorious work of its first investigator. On March 12, 1826, Unger made the first recorded observation of the formation and liberation of the terminal or non-sexual spores of this plant. Hassall, the able English botanist, made it the subject of extended study while preparing his fine work entitled "A History of the British Fresh Water Algae," published in 1845. He has given us a very graphic description of the phenomenon first observed by Unger. In 1856 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... the opposite side, which was scarcely to be expected—for there has never been any anxiety to cry aloud in defense of 'white slavery' from the housetops—but there has been a new and noteworthy conquest over indifference and over that sacred silence which was supposed to encompass all sexual topics with suitable darkness. The banishment of that silence in the cause of social hygiene is, indeed, not the least significant feature of this agitation. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... that, "as long as people thought in language, it was simply impossible to speak of morning or evening, of spring and winter, without giving to these conceptions something of an individual, active, sexual, and at last, personal character." (Chips, vol. ii., p. 55.) Here the concrete is derived from the abstract—the personal conception is represented as coming after the impersonal conception; and through ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence— the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been as sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the life of every ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... so far as it leads an individual to sacrifice himself for his species, and to live more in the species than in himself, this impulse is possessed of a certain resemblance with such modifications of the sexual impulse as are peculiar to man. The modifications to which I refer are those that confine this impulse to certain individuals of the other sex, whereby the interests of the species are attained. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... concerns them. Among the Ellesborough clan, which was a large one, there prevailed, along with the traditional American consideration for women, and especially among the women of the family themselves—a strict and even severe standard of sexual morals. There was no hypocrisy in it; they talked of it but little, but they lived by it; and their men were brought up in the atmosphere created by it. And as affection and tenderness and self-sacrifice were freely mixed with the asceticism, there was no rebellion—at any rate no open rebellion—among ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... persons is modern-day slavery, involving victims who are forced, defrauded, or coerced into labor or sexual exploitation. The International Labor Organization (ILO), the UN agency charged with addressing labor standards, employment, and social protection issues, estimates that 12.3 million people worldwide are enslaved in forced labor, bonded labor, forced ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Margot Dennison's kitchen was stocked. Ramsey used the time to prowl around the apartment. It was furnished in Sirian-archaic, a mode of furniture too feminine to suit Ramsey's tastes. But then, the uni-sexual Sirians, of course, often catered ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance
... Kings marrying only into the families of Kings, has been that of Europe for some centuries. Now, take any race of animals, confine them in idleness and inaction, whether in a sty, a stable, or a state-room, pamper them with high diet, gratify all their sexual appetites, immerse them in sensualities, nourish their passions, let every thing bend before them, and banish whatever might lead them to think, and in a few generations they become all body, and no mind: ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Compulsory Vaccination: Sexual Sterilization.—Personal liberty is not infringed by a compulsory vaccination law[114] enacted by a State or its local subdivisions pursuant to the police power for the purpose of protecting inhabitants against the spread of smallpox. ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... under Phallic Worship, reads as follows: "In early ages the sexual emblems were adored as most sacred objects, and in the several polytheistic systems the act or principle of which the phallus was the type was represented by a deity to whom it was consecrated: in Egypt by Khem, in India by Siva, in Assyria by Vul, in primitive Greece by Pan, ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... a sense no death. The organism is immortal because—strange paradox—it is not yet alive enough to die. But as we pass from the lower to the higher, we pass from the less individual to the more individual; from asexual to sexual. And with this change comes that great rhythm by which life and death succeed each other, and death is the cost of life, and to bring life into the world means sacrifice; and—as we rise higher still—to sustain life means prolonged and altruistic love. This is the ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... Since he takes sexual selection into his own hands and scientifically breeds the fish and the fowl, the beast and the vegetable, why may he not scientifically breed his own kind? The fish and the fowl and the beast and the vegetable obey dim yearnings ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... him that we had dozens of guns "at home"—that Fred's landed possessions were so vast that two hundred strong men walking for a month would be unable to march across them—that Fred's wives (Fred seemed to live under a cloud of sexual scandal in those days) were so many in number they had to be counted twice a day to make sure ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... 'Kanaka' is at the present day universally used in the South Seas by Europeans to designate the Islanders. In the various dialects of the principal groups it is simply a sexual designation applied to the males; but it is now used by the natives in their intercourse with foreigners in the same sense in which the latter ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... of sexual intercourse is usually called lust, whether it be held within bounds or not. I may add that the five last-mentioned emotions have no contraries, for moderation is a kind of ambition, and I have already observed that temperance, sobriety, and chastity show ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... easily grasped. Cypripeds have not the power of fertilizing themselves, except a single species, Cyp. Schlimii, which—accordingly, as we may say—is most difficult to import and establish; moreover, it flowers so freely that the seedlings are always weak. In all species the sexual apparatus is so constructed that it cannot be impregnated by accident, and few insects can perform the office. Dr. Hermann Muller studied Cyp. calceolus assiduously in this point of view. He observed only five species of insect which fertilize it. Cyp. calceolus ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... the faith of his Redeemer. They saw before their shrinking eyes a hundred corpses, washed and shrouded. "There is but one remedy against this evil," went on the minister, "the precious wounds of Christ." But how this remedy was to be used against sexual precocity, he did not tell them. He admonished them not to go to dances, to shun theatres and gaming-houses, and above all things, to avoid women; that is to say to act in exact contradiction to their inclinations. That this vice contradicts and utterly ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... is the source of the reproductive powers. It is the corner-stone essential to the foundation of all other temperaments. It has been supposed by some that the cerebellum is the seat of sexual instinct. The fact appears that an ample development of the posterior base of the cerebrum and the cerebellum indicates nutritive activity, which is certainly a condition most favorable to the display of amativeness. In a double sense, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... through the countenance of self-consciousness or guilt. Counterfeit meant a copy or a picture, then an unlawful duplication, especially of a coin. Lust meant pleasure of any sort, then inordinate sexual pleasure or desire. Virtue (to trace only a few of its varied activities) meant manliness, then the quality or attribute peculiar to true manhood (with the Romans this was valor), then any admirable quality, then female chastity. Pen meant a feather, then a quill to ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... clever women for fools can be explained only by the law of unlikeness which mostly governs sexual unions in physical matters; and its appearance in the story gives novelty and point. Aziz can plead only the violence of his passion which distinguished him as a lover among the mob of men who cannot love anything beyond ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... order is again divisible into families; each family into genera, and each genus into species, while a zoological "species" may be provisionally defined as "a group of animals which differ only by inconstant or sexual characters." ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... offer."[72] Our business, then, is not to restrain, but to put the wild beast to work, and use its mighty energies; for thus only shall we find the power to perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army convert turning over the lust for drink or sexual satisfaction to the lust to save his fellow-men. This transformation or sublimation is not the work of reason. His instinctive life, the main source of conduct, has been directed into a fresh channel ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... When their nations grow so over-populous and their families so large it means misery, that will not be a sign of their having felt ready for discipline. It will be a sign of their not having practised it in their sexual lives. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... that instead of going up in the flying-machine to fight, Graham might have given in to Ostrog, and married Helen. I have now removed the suggestion of these uncanny connubialities. Not the slightest intimation of any sexual interest could in truth have arisen between these two. They loved and kissed one another, but as a girl and her heroic grandfather might love, and in a crisis kiss. I have found it possible, without any very serious disarrangement, to clear all that objectionable stuff out of the ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... Ishmael knew it. What human being, he reflected, marooned as each of us is on the island of individuality, can understand another even when there is no barrier of a generation between, that barrier which only the element of sexual interest can overleap? There had been moments when he had wished that his destiny had not tied him quite so much, but on the whole he had loved that to which he was tied too dearly to resent it. He could see that Nicky thought his life had been very wasted; he allowed ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... industrious, instincts best developed, will rear more young, probably possessing her good qualities, and a greater number will thus prepared for the struggle of nature. Compared to man using a male alone of good breed. This latter section only of limited application, applies to variation of [specific] sexual characters. Introduce here contrast with Lamarck,—absurdity of habit, or chance?? or external conditions, making a woodpecker ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... such instinctive acts as make for the preservation of the species, as the sexual and parental instincts, jealousy, etc. The constructive instinct in man, also, may be considered parallel to the nesting ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... which is presented of the Irish priest as a money-grabbing martinet, whom his flock regard with mingled sentiments of detestation and fear, is a caricature as libellous as it is grotesque. Even the high standard of sexual morality which prevails in the country is attacked as being merely the result of early marriages, inculcated by a priesthood thirsting for marriage fees, and virtue itself is in this way depicted as being nothing but the bye-product of grasping avarice. I would ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... supper brands her left thigh with a flat-iron. Immediately upon publication of this masterpiece Spout received five hundred and ninety-four letters from anxious mothers, eight hundred and two requests for sexual advice from oppressed governesses and several threatening telegrams from ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... naked. The cacique of Xaguaguara paints himself black, and his subjects are painted red. The cacique and seven of his principal followers wore leaves of gold in their noses, hanging down to their lips, and in their opinion no more beautiful ornament exists. The men cover their sexual organs with a sea-shell, and the women wear a band of ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... to be sure, but I laughed long and hard over the sexual specialty of my uncle, Archduke Karl Ludwig, who is bad, ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... under twenty are married. The young men marry between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; the young women between twenty and thirty. Such postponement is due to the difficulty of earning sufficient to rear and support a family; and it undoubtedly leads, in the country districts, to sexual immorality. The form of this immorality, however, is very seldom that of prostitution, and less frequently that of illegitimacy than one would imagine. Rather, it takes the form of separation and desertion after a family group has been formed. The number of ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... argument to make, and this we present with a conviction of its truth, while conceding that it must remain a theory, until proven, each individual, man or woman, for himself and herself. The postulate is this: immortality (i.e. godhood) is bi-sexual. No male person can by any possibility become an immortal god, in, of and by himself; no female person can be complete without the "other half" that makes ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... so caressingly appreciative, so eloquently sincere, to remain himself outside the gates of Paradise? how could the pen which in the Crimean chapter on the Holy Shrines traced so exquisitely the delicate fancifulness of purest sexual love, perpetrate that elaborate sneer over the bachelor obsequies of Carrigaholt—"the lowly grave, that is the end of man's romantic hopes, has closed over all his rich fancies and all his high aspirations: he is utterly ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... itself comes they should be indignant at that which they have so long striven after and taken pains about." To corroborate this, Socrates asks one of his friends: "Does it seem to you befitting a philosopher to take trouble about so-called fleshly pleasures, such as eating and drinking? or about sexual pleasures? And do you think that such a man pays much heed to other bodily needs? To have fine clothes, shoes, and other bodily adornments,—do you think he considers or scorns this more than utmost necessity ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... which, without such external aids, often remains latent in the heart. The floor of the building was occupied by rows of long, cushionless benches, supplying the place of pews, and the broad aisle formed a sexual division, impassable except by children ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... two faces; people had been accustomed to say that Eva Loud and her gentleman looked more like brother and sister than a courting couple, and there was, moreover, a curious spirit of comradeship between the two. It asserted itself now with the young man, in opposition to the more purely sexual attraction of the pretty girl who was leaning against him, and for whom he ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... simplest forms multiply or reproduce by fission, but such asexual reproduction is almost entirely confined to the unicellular forms of life. It may be inferred, therefore, that the higher animal types could not have been evolved without sexual reproduction, and something of the meaning or significance of sex in the whole life process will, therefore, be helpful in understanding all of the higher forms of evolution. Biologists tell us that the meaning or purpose of sexual reproduction is to bring about greater organic variation. Now ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... letter to D'Alembert upon his article Geneve, in the French Encyclopedie, asks,—'Qui est-ce qui doute que, sur nos theatres, la meilleure piece de Sophocle ne tombat tout-a-plat?' And his reason (as collected from other passages) is—because an interest derived from the passion of sexual love can rarely be found on the Greek stage, and yet cannot be dispensed with on that of Paris. But why was it so rare on the Greek stage? Not from accident, but because it did not harmonize with the principle of that stage, and its ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... distinction between reproduction by seeds or ova and propagation by buds, though perfect in some of the lowest forms of life, becomes evanescent in others; and even the most absolute law we know in the physiology of genuine reproduction, that of sexual co-operation, has its exceptions in both kingdoms in parthenogenesis, to which in the vegetable kingdom a most curious series of gradations leads. In plants, likewise, a long and most finely graduated series of transitions leads from bisexual to unisexual blossoms; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to those cases where the gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that the comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or defect,—irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like. These defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and catastrophe. And the inference is again obvious. The ultimate power which shows itself disturbed ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... all this; it was evident to me the fellow had got into her, and broken her hymen with violence, and then her screams had prevented his finishing his work. Her manner convinced me that she was really not aware of the consequences, or rather had not as yet really had her sexual passions aroused. ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish, anger and the lusts to live and gratify themselves.—Yet they're odd; complex, like everything else alive. There is a kind of upward striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks me. I have some hope of this puma. I have worked hard at her head ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... aside, for woman represents the five senses: pleasure of the eyes, of the ears, of the mouth, of the finger-tips, of the nostrils: we did not fail to point out that though our brethren might go in and unto them for worthy motives, yet in so doing they would experience pleasure, and sexual pleasure leads to the pleasure of wine and food. One of the brethren said this might not be so if elderly women were chosen, and at first it seemed as if a compromise were possible. But a moment after, a brother reminded us that elderly ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... rapid adoption and universal use express touchingly the wonder of the early Church at its own unity. The then world was rent asunder by deep clefts of misunderstanding, alienation, animosity, racial divisions of Jew and Greek, Parthian, Scythian; by sexual divisions which flung men and women, who ought to have been linked hand in hand, and united heart to heart, to opposite sides of a great gulf; by divisions of culture which made wise men look down on the unlearned, and the unlearned hate the wise men; by clefts of social position, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... symbolism. The order is, first, the Southern, then the Western, Northern and Eastern panels as the fountain lies. The panel here illustrated is third in the sequence. In the first panel are shown the motive Elemental Emotions - Vanity, Sexual Love and mere Physical Parenthood without enlightenment. After the next milestone is the second panel called "Natural Selection." This presents the approach of the Strong Man; little wings beside his head indicate the dawn of Intellect. Women ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... he had adopted towards sexual matters fifteen years before, however, was too different from his father's. There was no bridging ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... is precisely in the progress of moral development that supernatural Religion manifests itself as a reality. Religion, indeed, is as natural to man as Art. But there is religion and Religion, as there is art and Art—the sexual religion of the primitive Semites, the animistic religion of China, the spiritual Religion that flowered on the Mount of the Beatitudes, embryonic religion and Religion adult; all, indeed, natural, yet of lower and of higher grade. Doubtless, Religion of whatever grade outranks ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... mercifully placed the sceptre in her hands. See where all my great philosophy ends—I can't help loving while I speak against them. The sneer upon my lips turns to a smile—my indignation to good-humor. Oh, Charles! Charles! right or wrong, they rule us; and if we must have sexual tyranny, it is best in the hands of mothers. But rather let us have no tyranny at all: let the man take his place as lord without, the woman her sovereignty over the inner world. Let her grace perfect his strength; her bosom hold his rude head and ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... and turns the current of life back inwards, into the slush and filth of selfish pleasure. The distinction between love and its perversion, which is impossible in the naive life of an animal, ought to be clear enough to all, and probably is. Nor should the sexual impulse in human beings be confused with fleshly desire, and treated as if it were merely natural, "the mere lust of life" common to all living things,—"that strive," as Spinoza put it, "to persevere in existing." For there is no purely natural impulse in man; all that he is, is transfused ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... more. They need assurance that they and their loved ones can walk the streets of America without being afraid. Parents need to know their children will not be victims of child pornography and abduction. This year we will intensify our drive against these and other horrible crimes like sexual ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan
... the two halves of a divided insect have continued to perform, or attempt, each their separate functions, the trunkless head feeding with its accustomed voracity, while the headless trunk has exhibited its appropriate excitability to the sexual influence. ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... daughters by the side of each other, and took position themselves behind them, all singing in the manner I have described before. Suddenly all the wives and daughters proceeded to throw off their robes of skins, presenting themselves stark naked, and exposing their sexual parts. But they were adorned with matachiats, that is beads and braided strings, made of porcupine quills, which they dye in various colors. After finishing their songs, they all said together, Ho, ho, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... had found for Argemone a better guide than her mother could have done, and her new pupil was rapidly becoming her teacher. She was matched, for the first time, with a man who was her own equal in intellect and knowledge; and she felt how real was that sexual difference which she had been accustomed to consider as an insolent calumny against woman. Proudly and indignantly she struggled against the conviction, but in vain. Again and again she argued with him, and was vanquished,—or, at least, what is far better, made to see how ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... general practice. I am a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals. In particular, I regard much current morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong; and I regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion as understood in England to-day with abhorrence. I write plays with the deliberate object of converting the nation to my opinions in these matters. I have no other effectual incentive to ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... should be just as courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may learn courtesy. A child should never be pushed into notice, never compelled to endure caresses, never overwhelmed with kisses, which ordinarily torment him and are often the cause of sexual hyperaesthesia. The child's demonstrations of affection should be reciprocated when they are sincere, but one's own demonstrations should be reserved for special occasions. This is one of the many excellent maxims of training that are disregarded. Nor should the child be forced ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... naturalists fully accepted the doctrine of the evolution of species, it seemed to me advisable to work up such notes as I possessed, and to publish a special treatise on the origin of man. I was the more glad to do so, as it gave me an opportunity of fully discussing sexual selection—a subject which had always greatly interested me. This subject, and that of the variation of our domestic productions, together with the causes and laws of variation, inheritance, and the intercrossing ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... exception to it is a curious-piece of literary and personal history. Those who read Asolando, the last book of poems he published, were surprised to find with what intensity some of the first poems in it described the passion of sexual love. They are fully charged with isolated emotion; other thoughts than those of love do not intrude upon them. Moreover, they have a sincere lyric note. It is impossible, unless by a miracle of imagination, that ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... about the buttercups, with bees, wasps, and beetles - upwards of sixty species. Modern scientists believe that the habit of feeding on flowers has called out the color-sense of insects and the taste for bright colors, and that sexual selection has been guided by this taste. The most unscientific among us soon finds evidence on every hand that flowers and insects have developed together through ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... sensitive to the expression of animal eyes—witness "cow-eyed" Hera, or the opprobrious epithet "dog-eyed"; altogether, the more we study what is left of their zoological researches, the more we realize what close observers they were in natural history. Aristotle, for instance, points out sexual differences in the feet of the crawfish which were overlooked up to a short time ago. And Hesiod also insists upon the dragon's eyes. Yet it is significant that ophis, the snake, is derived, like drakon, from a root meaning nothing more than to ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... come is altogether free from material factors. At a much earlier period (in the third century) Rab had said (Ber. 17 a): 'Not as this world is the world to come. In the world to come there is no eating or drinking, no sexual intercourse, no barter, no envy, hatred, or contention. But the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads, enjoying the splendour of the Shechinah (the Divine Presence).' Commenting on this in various places, Maimonides ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... meet the drones, in the air, for the purpose of fecundation. The manner of the queen's impregnation is yet a disputed point, and probably never witnessed by any one. The majority of close observers, I believe, are of opinion that the drones are the males, and that sexual connection takes place in the air,[1] performing their amours while on the wing, like the humble-bee and some other insects. It appears that one impregnation is operative during her life, as old queens are not afterwards seen coming out for ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... did nearly all the writing and public speaking of the world, setting so the fashion in thought, women, naturally extolled with true sexual extravagance, came to be considered, even by themselves, as a very superior order of beings, with something in them of divinity which was denied to man. Not only were they represented as better, generally, than men, as indeed anybody could see that they were, but their ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... in her present phase, to think the Russians and the French the only novelists. They had manner and method. But they were both too limited in their field, too much concerned with sexual relations, that most tedious of topics (in literature, not life), the very thought of which made one yawn. Queer thing, how novelists couldn't leave it alone. It was, surely, like eating and drinking, a natural element in life, which few avoid; but the most exciting, ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... already pointed out, that temperance, sobriety, and chastity indicate rather a power than a passivity of the mind. It may, nevertheless, happen, that an avaricious, an ambitious, or a timid man may abstain from excess in eating, drinking, or sexual indulgence, yet avarice, ambition, and fear are not contraries to luxury, drunkenness, and debauchery. For an avaricious man often is glad to gorge himself with food and drink at another man's expense. An ambitious man will restrain himself in nothing, so long ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... that the world is set free for love-making. Down there,—under the clouds, the lovers foregather. I know your songs, Kahn, your half-mystical songs, in which you represent this old hard world dissolving into a luminous haze of love—sexual love.... I don't think you are right or true in that. You are a young, imaginative man, and you see life—ardently—with the eyes of youth. But the power that has brought man into these high places under this blue-veiled blackness of the sky and which beckons us on ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... and just after blossoming, will prevent it. In making up your strawberry list remember that some varieties have imperfect, or pistillate blossoms, and that when such varieties are used a row of some perfect-flowering (bi- sexual) sort must be set every ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... have already observed that temperance, sobriety, and chastity show a power and not a passion of the mind. Even supposing that an avaricious, ambitious, or timid man refrains from an excess of eating, drinking, or sexual intercourse, avarice, ambition, and fear are not therefore the opposites of voluptuousness, drunkenness, or lust. For the avaricious man generally desires to swallow as much meat and drink as he can, provided only it belong to another person. The ambitious ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... know how the Supreme Court ruled on that, Lawrence. And particularly since the medics revealed its effect on reducing sexual inhibitions. No, Mr. Hackett and Secret Service will have to get the truth out of the girl by some other means. At any rate, it is out of ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... consciousness has justly met with contradiction. It has been impossible here to go into his discussions in the philosophy of nature—they cannot be described in brief—on matter (atomic forces), on the mechanical and teleological views of life and its development, on instinct, on sexual love, etc., which he very skillfully uses in ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... life, be his possessions and social position what they may, who takes no pleasure with her. All description utterly fails to express the varied and exultant enjoyments God has engrafted into a right sexual state. Only few experiences can attest how many and great, from infancy to death, and throughout eternity itself. All God could do He has done to render each sex superlatively happy in the other. Of all his beautiful and perfect work, this is the most beautiful and perfect. Of all his benignant ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... purged of ordinary impurities. Thus the intending yogin should practise absolute non-injury to all living beings (ahi@msa), absolute and strict truthfulness (satya), non-stealing (asteya), absolute sexual restraint (brahmacarya) and the acceptance of nothing but that which is absolutely necessary (aparigraha). These are collectively called yama. Again side by side with these abstinences one must ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... parents and other members of the family first shape themselves, and how they gradually become more serious and more intimate; how friendships are formed and broken. We are shown the dawn of love, feeling out towards its first objects. Above all, we are shown how the mystery of the sexual life first presses itself vaguely on the attention, and then takes entire possession of the growing intelligence, so that the child suffers under the load of secret knowledge but gradually becomes ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... of men. I do not say it has solved them, but it has dispelled them and made them irrelevant and uninteresting. So long as one believed that life span unprogressively from generation to generation, that generation followed generation unchangingly for ever, the enormous preponderance of sexual needs and emotions in life was a distressing and inexplicable fact—it was a mystery, it was sin, it was the work of the devil. One asked, why does man build houses that others may live therein; plant trees whose fruit he will never see? And all the toil and ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... rebellion, of her intense desire to satisfy in action the emotion aroused by a sense of wrong, his creed had made a violent appeal, but in his voice, in his eyes, in his manner she had been quick to detect a personal, sexual note that disturbed and alarmed her, that implied in him a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that we returned. The whole question of Amour became a terribly serious one. Earnest young men wrote in the public prints that from this time forth it would be impossible ever again to make a joke of any sexual matter. Professors wrote thick books in which sex was sterilised and dissected. It has become customary for serious young women, like Mary, to discuss, with philosophic calm, matters of which the merest hint would have sufficed to ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... tested. On the European Continent it has been successfully applied in a great variety of cases; and Bernheim has shown that minor nervous troubles, insomnia, migraines, drunkenness, lighter cases of rheumatism, sexual and digestive disorders, together with a host of smaller temporary causes of pain—corns, cricks in back and side, etc.—may be cured or very materially alleviated by suggestions conveyed in the hypnotic state. In many cases such ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... gained—what pledge of success in food, in safety, in propagation? They are not separate entities, they have none of the freedom of action, of choice, of individuality of the solitary wasps. They are the somatic cells of the body politic, while deep within the nest are the guarded sexual cells—the winged kings and queens, which from time to time, exactly as in isolated organisms, are thrown off to propagate, and to found new nests. They, no less than the workers, are parts of something more subtle than the visible Attas and their material ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... perfectly easy task to pretend that the crazy makeshifts of our legal and political systems, the staggering accidents of economic relationship, the festering disorder of contemporary philosophy and religious teaching, the cruel and stupid bed of King Og that is our last word in sexual adjustment, really constituted a noble and enduring sanity, and it became less and less so with the acute disillusionments that arose out of the Boer War. The first decade of the twentieth century was for the English a decade of badly sprained optimism. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... folly and weakness. Christianity did not change his sentiment on this subject. The modern Englishman, Swede, Dane, Norwegian, or German regards love in exactly that deep, serious, noble way that his pagan ancestors did. I think we can say that different races have differences of feeling on sexual relations, which differences are very much older than any written history. They are in the blood and soul of a people, and neither religion nor civilization can utterly ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... attractive, and I have imagined that this might be due to the continuous influence of student blood through many centuries in refining the population, the finest specimens of the young students proving irresistible to the women of the people, and so raising the level of the population by sexual selection. At Salamanca I was impressed by the unusual charm of the women, and even at Palencia to some extent noticed it, though Palencia ceased to be the great university of Spain nearly eight centuries ago. At Fecamp I have been struck by the occasional occurrence ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis |
