How to Think More About Sex Quotes

“Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Once we are involved in a relationship, there is no longer any such thing as a minor detail.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Sex gets us out of the house and out of ourselves.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Nothing is erotic that isn’t also, with the wrong person, revolting, which is precisely what makes erotic moments so intense: at the precise juncture where disgust could be at its height, we find only welcome and permission.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us—which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced (as it may need be, for instance, when two lovers are already married to other people) by a declaration of that desire—a confession which may in itself be so erotic as to render the actual kiss superfluous.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“By overwhelming consensus, our culture locates the primary difficulty of relationships in finding the ‘right’ person rather than in knowing how to love a real — that is, a necessarily rather unright — human being.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“The new pornography would combine sexual excitement with an interest in other human ideals. The usual animalistic categories and hackneyed plots, replete with stock characters seemingly incapable of coherent speech, would give way to pornographic images and scenarios based aorund such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sweetness and regard) or humility (people caught looking embarrassed, shy or self-conscious).”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Rejection hurts so much because we take it as a damning judgement passed not merely on our physical appeal but on our entire selves, and by extension (at this stage we’re crying into our pillow, as something by Bach or Leonard Cohen plays on the stereo) on our very right to exist. 2.”
― Alain de Botton, How To Think More About Sex: The School of Life

“Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be.”
― Alain de Botton, How To Think More About Sex: The School of Life

“It is as if we need to be reminded of convention in order properly to appreciate the wonder of being unguarded...”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident. We can start to break free from this torture by recognizing that the evenings that don’t work out are really just a minor species of bad luck. The”
― Alain de Botton, How To Think More About Sex: The School of Life

“The wish to sleep with certain people can arise in us long before we have had the chance to get to know them properly – before, that is, we have had any opportunity to sit down and have a discussion with them about their history, interests and feelings.”
― Alain de Botton, How To Think More About Sex: The School of Life

“The defenders of feeling-based marriage venerate emotions for their authenticity only because they avoid looking closely at what actually floats through most people's emotional kaleidoscopes, all the contradictory, sentimental, and hormonal forces that pull us in a hundred often crazed and inconclusive directions.

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb. A degree of repression is necessary for both the mental health of our species and the adequate functioning of a decently ordered society. We are chaotic chemical propositions. We should feel grateful for, and protected by, the knowledge that our external circumstances are often out of line with what we feel; it is a sign that we are probably on the right course.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don’t like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“We were bothered by sex because it is a fundamentally disruptive, overwhelming and demented force, strongly at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres’s portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“For most of our lives, sex seems fated to remain steeped in longing and awkwardness. Whatever the manuals may promise, there are really no solutions to the majority of the dilemmas sex creates for us.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous.”
― Alain de Botton, How To Think More About Sex: The School of Life

“We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time, perhaps even a lot of it – inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a light bulb.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“There are lessons for long-term relationships in the way that Manet approached asparagus.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate.”
― Alain de Botton, How To Think More About Sex: The School of Life

“The more closely we analyse what we consider ‘sexy’, the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence. The”
― Alain de Botton, How To Think More About Sex: The School of Life

“It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“We can achieve a balanced view of adult love not by remembering what it felt like to be loved as a child but rather by imagining what it took for our parents to love us - namely, a great deal of work.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells. We should feel grateful for, and protected by, the knowledge that our external circumstances are often out of line with what we feel; it is a sign that we are probably on the right course.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex