Your body is the church where nature asks to be reverenced.
—Marquis de Sade, 1797Quotes
Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.
—Tom Stoppard, 1993Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.
—Willem de Kooning, 1949Every tooth in a man’s head is more valuable than a diamond.
—Miguel de Cervantes, 1605What are men anyway but balloons on legs, a lot of blown-up bladders?
—Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. 64Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.
—Marcus Aurelius, c. 170To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.
—Simone de Beauvoir, 1949There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.
—Karl Marx, 1860The human body is the best picture of the human soul.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
—Oscar Wilde, 1890The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.
—Anaïs Nin, 1935As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.
—Chinua Achebe, 1958