sex is merely a genetic joint venture. the process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective.

Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.

But we have turned that, what you call sexual activity, which is biological in its nature, into a pleasure movement. There must be two, you know. I love somebody and somebody else loves me. Wherever there is division, there can’t be love. We are trying to bridge this gap, which is horrible for us, which has no meaning, which is demanding something from us, with this fancy idea that there must be love between these two individuals.

Sexuality is not a separate compartment of human life; it is a radiance pervading every human relationship, but assuming a particular intensity at certain points.

2Sex relations are intended for having children. 3You have misunderstood sex, because you regard it as a way of establishing human contact for yourself

The experience of sexual love is therefore no longer to be sought as the repetition of a familiar ecstasy, prejudiced by the expectation of what we already know. It will be the exploration of our relationship with an ever-changing, ever unknown, partner, unknown because he or she is not in truth the abstract role or person, the set of conditioned reflexes which society has imposed, the stereotyped male or female which education has led us to expect.

Everyone's sex life is funny except your own. Every person's is, and yours never is. The lengths people go to — and the extremes and the conditions and the mental exercises and guilt and shame and happiness that everybody goes through — and what they'll do for sex is never-ending and mind-boggling and very interesting to me. And I don't think a lot of times people choose any of it.

What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.

The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.

Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence — either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage.

[S]exual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation of from nature, especially when the reals of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.

Sex: In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.

Gradually it became clear that it is a <i>fundamental error to try to give the sexual act a psychological interpretation,</i> to attribute to it a psychic meaning as if it were a neurotic symptom. But this is what the psychoanalysts did. On the contrary: any idea occurring in the course of the sexual act only has the effect of hindering one's absorption in the excitation. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations of genitality constitute a denial of genitality as a biological function. By composing it of non-genital excitations, one denies the existence of genitality. The function of the orgasm, however, had revealed the qualitative difference between genitality and pregenitality. <i>Only the genital apparatus can provide orgasm and can discharge sexual energy completely. Pregenitality,</i> on the other hand, can <i>only increase vegetative tensions.</i> One readily sees the deep rift which formed here in psychoanalytic concepts.

Morality in sexual relations, when it is free from superstition, consists essentially in respect for the other person, and unwillingness to use that person solely as a means of personal gratification, without regard to his or her desires.