If you realize that the ultimate happiness for all depends not on disorder of the emotions for either sex, but in harmonizing the emotions, all the problems will vanish.
It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.
It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?
There's nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.
The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that at bottom they honor and love only themselves (or their ownideal, to express it more agreeably). Thus man wants woman to be peaceable--but woman is essentially, like the cat, not peaceable, however well she may have trained herself to assume the appearance of peace.
It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself roundtill he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die.
I'm sorry, but I do hate this differentiation between the sexes. The modern girl has a thoroughly businesslike attitude to life! That sort of thing. It's not a bit true! Some girls are businesslike and some aren't. Some men are sentimental and muddle-headed, others are clear-headed and logical. There are just different types of brains.
A man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year. Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the repulsion, always different, always new.
For someone to promise a percentage type cure for this issue, for instance I had someone who said they had experienced a 90 percent permanent - in all caps PERMANENT - reduction of their same-sex attraction. How can we quantify that? How can you even know that that's what you have experienced? And what if at some point you fall to 85 percent or 70 percent? That, I think, sets people up for unrealistic expectations and is something that I'm not willing to offer when we're sharing these types of messages or presenting what was presented to me.
The Phoenix riddle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it. So to one neutral thing both sexes fit, We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love.
There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort.
It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that.
But who is this, what thing of sea or land,- Female of sex it seems,- That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for th' isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill'd, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play, An amber scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger?
Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.