"Erotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... erudite Lorenzo Valla—of whom more anon—wrote his famous indictment of virginity, condemning it as against nature with arguments of a most insidious logic. This was the age in which Casa, Archbishop of Benevento, wrote a most singular work of erotic philosophy, which, coming from a churchman's pen, will leave you cold with horror should you chance to turn its pages. This was the age of the Discovery of Man; the pagan age which stripped Christ of His divinity to bestow it upon Plato, so that Marsilio Ficino actually burnt an altar-lamp before ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... literature and the fine arts received wide extension. Thus, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, of Osaka, the greatest dramatist that his country ever possessed, composed plays which have earned for him the title of the "Shakespeare of Japan;" and as for the light literature of the era, though it was disfigured by erotic features, it faithfully reflected in other respects the social conditions ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... is equally removed from the erotic mysticism of Richard Crashaw and from the adoration, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper. To find an analogue, you have to cross the borders of English into Spain. In his Noble Numbers Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such men as Valdivielso, Ocana, Lope de Ubeda; and there are ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... of the worship of the demons in distinction from that of good powers. Civa represents the ascetic, dark, awful, bloody side of religion: Vishnu, the gracious, calm, hopeful, loving side; the former is fearful, mysterious, demoniac; the latter is joyful, erotic, divine. In their later developments it is not surprising to see that Vishnuism, in the form of Krishnaism, becomes more and more erotic, while Civaism becomes more and more ghastly and ghoulish. Wild and varied as are the beliefs of the epic, there is space ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... romanticized pictures of the struggle of the gentry in the third century. "The Tale of the Three Kingdoms" became the model for countless historical novels of its own and subsequent periods. Later, mainly in the sixteenth century, the sensational and erotic novel developed, most of all in Nanking. It has deeply influenced Japanese writers, but was mercilessly suppressed by the Chinese gentry which resented the frivolity of this wealthy and luxurious urban class of middle or small gentry families ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... the palatial private car, and were introduced to a number of other guests. Among them was Major Venable; and while Oliver buried himself in the new issue of the fantastic-covered society journal, which contained the poem of the erotic "Ysabel," his brother chatted with the Major. The latter had taken quite a fancy to the big handsome stranger, to whom everything in the city ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... pleasure. He allowed nothing whatever to interfere with this—Gautier and Flaubert, La Bruyere and Montaigne were his favourite authors, but he read a great deal of English, Italian, and Spanish, and had a marvelous memory. He enjoyed, too, erotic literature and had a fine collection of erotic books and prints shut away in a cabinet in his study. He found great fascination in theological books: he laughed at many of them, but kept an open mind—atheistic and materialistic dogmas seemed to him as absurd as orthodox ones. He ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... first glance. When POPE was a child, he found in his mother's closet a small library of mystical devotion; but it was not suspected, till the fact was discovered, that the effusions of love and religion poured forth in his "Eloisa" were caught from the seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the last retained a place in his library among the classical bards of antiquity. The accidental perusal of Quintus Curtius first made BOYLE, to use his own words, "in love with other than pedantic books, and conjured up in him an unsatisfied ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... personage at Court, receiving high rank and titles. The Chinese Tripitaka contains 108 translations[661] ascribed to him, mostly of a tantric character, though to the honour of China it must be said that the erotic mysticism of some Indian tantras never found favour there. Amogha is a considerable, though not auspicious, figure in the history of Chinese Buddhism, and, so far as such changes can be the work of one man, on him rests the responsibility of making it become in ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... nymphomania (morbid in women); (of animals) oestrus, rut, heat, oestruation. Antonym: anaphrodisia. Associated Words: aphrodisiac, antaphrodisiac, anaphrodisiac, aphrodisiacal, amative, amativeness, amorous, amorousness, amatory, antiorgastic, philter, oestrual, sedative, erotic, erotomania, sadism, satyromaniac. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... breadwinner, and speaking of Woman's "sphere" with condescension, even with chivalry, as if the kitchen and the nursery were less important than the office in the city. When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea. You must admit that here Nature beats Comedy out of the field: the wildest hominist or feminist farce is insipid after the most commonplace "slice ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... or material about Verlaine's response to erotic appeals. His nervous organisation was so finely strung that, when he loved, he loved with his whole nature, with body, soul and spirit, in a sort of quivering ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... were wont to say things about Locusta and Borgia. The commoner sort swore like hell at Freddy Parker. It made you feel squiffy after the sixth glass—argumentative, magisterial, maudlin, taciturn, erotic, sentimental, sea-sick, ecstatic, paralysed, lachrymose, hilarious, pugilistic—according to your temperament. Whatever your temperament it gave you a thundering head next morning, and a throat like Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace. It was known as ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... little more of this erotic battledore-and-shuttlecock would send them both out of their minds. It was a mistake to write, when both needed a holiday. He telephoned to his agent and walked to Covent Garden for a consultation about the lecturing-tour ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... chequered here and there by intimations of pantheism; they made no frontal assault upon the central positions of theology. When we turn to their emotional poetry we find that they were always decorous; there is much discourse of love, often passionate, never erotic, no tearing aside of drapery, not a line to scare modesty. In Tennyson's most impassioned lyrics the principal figure is the broken-hearted lover, jilted by Cousin Amy, or caught in the garden with Maud—with intentions ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... not a temporary inclination, but "a synthesis of desire and friendship," just as the air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. It must be this for both sexes alike, and Ellen Key sees a real progress in what seems to her the modern tendency for men to realize that the soul has its erotic side, and for women to realize that the senses have. She has no special sympathy with the cry for purity in masculine candidates for marriage put forward by some women of the present day. She observes that many men who have painfully struggled to maintain this ideal ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... shall do so, begging pardon of the learned. It means, "My life, I love you!" which sounds very prettily in all languages, and is as much in fashion in Greece at this day as, Juvenal tells us, the two first words were amongst the Roman ladies, whose erotic expressions were all Hellenised. [The reference is to the [Greek: Zoe/ kai Psyche] of Roman courtesans. Vide Juvenal, lib. ii., Sat. vi. line 195; Martial, Epig. x. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... poet's writing there are passages of a large historical understanding. Of all modern writers he is foremost Latin, in knowledge, in instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition. Even in his erotic and mystical passages this vein of purest gold may be seen, this understanding of the potential greatness of the tradition into which he was born. What wonder, then, that the first fundamental passion of the mature man's soul should be his desire to proclaim once more the cause of Latin civilization, ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... untrustworthy. And the statement of some critics, that the Phaedrus was Plato's earliest composition, is clearly nothing more than an inference (doubtful at best, and in my judgment erroneous) from its dithyrambic style and erotic subject. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that is, certain peculiar niceties practiced in connection with the emptying of the bowels, play in the evolution of the race have been extensively discussed in literature. Havelock Ellis[7] says in this connection—"The most usual erotic symbolisms in childhood are those of the scatologic group, the significance of which has often been emphasized by Freud and his school. The channels of urination and defecation are so close to the sexual centers that the intimate connection between the two groups is easily ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... presence. The Mellea and Caspia—the one too easy of capture, the other too difficult—to whom so many of the Latin epigrams are addressed, are said to have been his chief schoolmistresses in love. But he has buried most of his erotic woes, such as they were, in a dead language. His English poems do not portray him as a man likely to die of love, or even to forget a meal on account of it. His world is a happy land of song, in which ladies all golden in the sunlight ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... oracles of classical mythology! Briefly, it appears that in the best period of ancient Greece nine Muses were recognised, namely, Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry; Euterpe, of lyric poetry; Erato, of erotic poetry; Melpomene, of tragedy; Thalia, of comedy; Polyhymnia, of sacred hymns; Terpsichore, of choral song and dance; Clio, of history; and Urania, of astronomy. The last two seem to have very little in common with the addiction to singing and dancing ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... led up to the temple; votive offerings hung on the trees; festal dances, it may be, performed; while in the cloister which skirted the peribolus, dealers in shrines and images chaffered with their customers, erotic poets sang their lays, lovers whispered, fortune-tellers plied their trade, and a throng of pilgrims walked lazily along, or sat on the ground, breathing in the soft, moist air, feasting their eyes upon the beauty of upspringing fountain and ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... Strindberg at length decided to write a book about woman, a subject, he declares, which up to this time he had not wanted to think about, as he himself "lived in a happy erotic state, ennobled and beautified by the rejuvenating and expiatory arrival of children." But nevertheless he decided to write such a book, and so with sympathy and much old-fashioned veneration for motherhood the task ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg |
