Sexual Desire Quotes

“The plain fact is that, because we live in a world structured by gender, the other sex is forever to some extent a mystery to us, with a dimension of experience that we can imagine but never inwardly know. In desiring to unite with it, we are desiring to mingle with something that is deeply- perhaps essentially- not ourselves, and which brings us to experience a character and inwardness that challenge us with their strangeness.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“We value modesty partly because we value desire, and look with suspicion on those habits which untie the knot of individual attachment. Havelock Ellis put the point tendentiously, but (as I shall argue) correctly, when he wrote:
'In the art of love...[modesty] is more than a grace; it must always be fundamental. Modesty is not indeed the last word of love, but it is the necessary foundation for all love's exquisite audacities, the foundation which alone gives worth and sweetness to what Senancour calls its 'delicious impudence'. Without modesty, we could not have, nor rightly value at its true worth, that bold and pure candour which is at once the final revelation of love and the seal of its sincerity.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“[…] fantasy does not exist comfortably with reality. It has a natural tendency to realise itself: to remake the world in its own image. The harmless wanker with the video-machine can at any moment, turn into the desperate rapist with a gun. The 'reality principle' by which the normal sexual act is regulated is a principle of personal encounter, which enjoins us to respect the other person, and to respect, also, the sanctity of his body, as the tangible expression of another self. The world of fantasy obeys no such rule, and is governed by monstrous myths and illusions which are at war with the human world — the illusions, for example, that women wish to be raped, that children have only to be awakened in order to give and receive the intensest sexual pleasure, that violence is not an affront but an affirmation of a natural right. All such myths, nurtured in fantasy, threaten not merely the consciousness of the man who lives by them, but also the moral structure of his surrounding world. They render the world unsafe for self and other, and cause the subject to look on everyone, not as an end in himself, but as a possible means to his private pleasure. In his world, the sexual encounter has been 'fetishised', to use the apt Marxian term, and every other human reality has been poisoned by the sense of the expendability and replaceability of the other.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“The laws of physics, which govern the behaviour of atoms and the movements of the stars, govern also the conduct of rational beings.
And yet: Being is still enchanted for us;
in a hundred Places it remains a source - a play of pure Powers, which touches no one, who does not kneel and wonder.
Words still go softly forth towards the unsayable. And music, always new, from palpitating stones
Builds in useless space its godly home.
[Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, n]

This enchantment — revealed to us in the constant intimation of sacred things — belongs, not to the world of physical science, but to the Lebenswelt, which we ourselves construct through our collusive actions. The 'scientific realist' sees only a disenchanted world; and what he sees is real. But within reality we also make our home, and in doing so we provide the meaning that is lacking from the world of science.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“(...) the power of jealousy is one of the most important facts to be taken account of in the derivation of sexual morality. In a world where sexual prohibitions are of diminishing force, we should not be surprised that so many people take refuge from jealousy in the avoidance of love. For where love exists, the price of sexual freedom is suffering.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“Here we should notice a peculiar fact: that there are movements which are both essentially involuntary and yet confined to persons - to creatures with a self-conscious perspective. Smiles and blushes are the two most prominent examples. Milton puts the point finely in Paradise Lost:
for smiles from Reason flow,
To brute denied, and are of love the food.

These physiognomic movements owe their rich intentionality to this involuntary character, for it is this which suggests that they show the other 'as he really is'. Hence they become the pivot and focus of our interpersonal responses, and of no response more than sexual desire. The voluntary smile is not a smile at all, but a kind of grimace which, while it may have its own species of sincerity—as in the smile of Royalty, which as it were pays lip-service to good nature — is not esteemed as an expression of the soul. On the contrary, it is perceived as a mask, which conceals the 'real being' of the person who wears it. Smiling must be understood as a response to another person, to a thought or perception of his presence, and it has its own intentionality. To smile is to smile at something or someone, and hence when we see someone smiling in the street we think of him as 'smiling to himself, meaning that there is some hidden object of his present thought and feeling.
The smile of love is a kind of intimate recognition and acceptance of the other's presence - an involuntary acknowledgement that his existence gives you pleasure.
The smile of the beloved is not flesh, but a kind of stasis in the movement of the flesh. It is a paradigm of 'incarnation': of the other made flesh, and so transforming the flesh in which he is made. Thus the smile of Beatrice conveys her spiritual reality; Dante must be fortified in order to bear it, for to look at it is to look at the sun (Paradiso, XXIII, 47—8): tu hai vedute cose, che possente set fatto a sostener lo riso mio.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“The very same ‘mystery’ that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“Even if the fantasy can be overcome so far as to engage in the act of love with another, a peculiar danger remains. The other becomes veiled in substitutes; he is never fully himself in the act of love; it is never clearly him that I desire, or him that I possess, but always rather a composite object, a universal body, of which he is but one among a potential infinity of instances. Fantasy fills our thoughts with a sense of the obscene, and the orgasm becomes, not the possession of another, but the expenditure of energy on his depersonalised body. Fantasies are private property, which I can dispose according to my will, with no answerability to the other whom I abuse through them. He, indeed, is of no intrinsic interest to me, and serves merely as my opportunity for self-regarding pleasure. For the fantasist, the ideal partner is indeed the prostitute, who, because she can be purchased, solves at once the moral problem presented by the presence of another at the scene of sexual release.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“Mahomed has often been mocked for peopling his paradise with desirable women, and inviting us to long for their caresses. But surely he was responding to a natural and healthy instinct, which finds in the contemplation of a beautiful body, not only the stimulus to desire, but also the satisfaction of a deeper yearning. We yearn, in fact, to justify the human body, to give grounds for our feeling that this is God's image. And in this yearning is expressed our real knowledge that we are our bodies and that they are we.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“In the heterosexual act, it might be said, I move out from my body towards the other, whose flesh is unknown to me; while in the homosexual act I remain locked within my body narcissistically contemplating in the other an excitement that is the mirror of my own.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“Philosophy is the art of second glances”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“Many social and political changes have swept the world clean of the apprehension of sacred things: the rejection of custom and ceremony; the conversion of marriage into a defeasible contract; the relaxing of the laws governing, sexual conduct and obscenity; the decline of faith and saintliness. As those changes take their effect, the experience of erotic love becomes darigerous and uncertain in its outcome. Our responsibility retreats further from the confused terrain of sexual experience, and threatens even to void it of desire.
Hence, it might be said, my ability to reflect, in so neutral and philosophical a fashion, on the nature of this phenomenon is perhaps already an index of its decline: of the fact that desire does not, now, have the importance for us that formerly caused men to conceal it in poetry or overcome it through prayer. What we understand of our condition may also pass from us in the act of understanding. For we were never meant to have knowledge of this thing; we were meant only to be subject to its command. No phenomenon, perhaps, illustrates more profoundly the great poetical utterance of Hegel; that
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the gathering of the dusk.
On the other hand, it is a century and a half since Hegel wrote those words, and life goes on.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“The bitter thought against which Don Juan hopelessly rebels is the same thought that contains the promise of Tristan's consolation: the thought of death. Don Juanism and Tristanism are extreme responses to a perception that lies at the root of human attraction and human love: the thought of our common mortality.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

“No linguistic behaviour can logically determine its own sequel, since no past time can logically determine the future. A man may 'follow a rule' as we do, and yet, at some future time, diverge from us, insisting all the while that what he is doing is the same as what he has always done. We cannot establish, once and for all, and with no possibility of doubt, that another really does understand a word as we do — whether that word be 'he' or “I”. The only point is that, if he begins to make mistakes in his use of “I”, this shows either that he has ceased to understand the word (and there are psychotics of whom this is true) or else that he always understood it wrongly (a most disturbing possibility). The problem of distinguishing between those alternatives is acute: but it is a general problem in the theory of meaning, and has nothing special to do with 'I'.”
― Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation