It is with our passions, as it is with fire and water, they are good servants but bad masters.

Aesop (620 BC - 560 BC)

Confidence is the sexiest thing a woman can have. It's much sexier than any body part.

Aimee Mullins, Oprah Magazine, May 2004

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

Any piece of clothing can be sexy with a quietly passionate¹ woman inside it.

Anonymous², O Magazine, The Shy Girl's Guide to Sex, February 2003

Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss³, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.

Betty Friedan (1921 - 2006)

Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.

Billy Crystal (1947 - )

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting⁴ passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.

C. S. Lewis (1898 - 1963), 'The Pilgrim's Regress'

It's just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we're all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. it's like a kind of poetry.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Mister Sandman, 1994

I'm too shy to express my sexual needs except over the phone to people I don't know.

Garry Shandling (1949 - )

I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.

George Burns (1896 - 1996)

Sexually,we are all competing for the same seat on the bus and the thing that holds it together is the tightly held conceit⁵ that we are all sexual gods. How can I believe in my own uniqueness when there's a cat out there exactly the same as me?

Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Altered Egos⁶, 1993

A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp.

Joan Rivers (1935 - )

In English, we don't have a word for people who aren't virgins⁸. What the non-virgin⁷ lexical gap really made me think was that our obsession⁹ with sexual purity is such that once you are no longer this THING, you are indescribable.

John Green, Vlogbrothers, Dumping My 15-Year-Old Girlfriend, 09-24-13

Sexuality is important, but it's certainly not the most interesting or important thing happening to you right now. We live in a world that tells us that there are only two important things. One is the acquisition of goods and the other is either the acquisition or avoidance of sex, but it turns out that the question of who's a virgin and who's a virgout is not the most interesting question.

John Green, Vlogbrothers, Dumping My 15-Year-Old Girlfriend, 09-24-13

In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact.

Marlene Dietrich (1901 - 1992)

Does it really matter what these affectionate people do-- so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!

Mrs. Patrick Campbell

One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.

Norman Mailer (1923 - 2007)

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

R. D. Laing

Desperate is not a sexual preference.

Randy K. Milholland, Something Postive, 01-08-09

I know love and lust¹⁰ don't always keep the same company.