Great Throughts Treasury

"Sensuality is the death of the soul." - Honoré de Balzac

"Sordid and infamous sensuality , the most dreadful evil that issued from the box of Pandora, corrupts every heart, and eradicates every virtue." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon

"Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man." - Søren Kierkegaard, fully Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

"If sensuality were happiness, beasts were happier than men; but human felicity is lodged in the soul, not in the flesh." -

"Sensuality is the grave of the soul." - William Ellery Channing

"Imagination is nature's equal, sensuality her slave." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Those indeed are conquerors who, as I have now, have conquered the intoxications (the mental intoxications arising from ignorance, sensuality, or craving after future life). Evil dispositions have ceased in me; therefore it is I that am conqueror!" -

"He who has enough to satisfy what he wants, and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance - all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality and pride." - Henry of Langenstein NULL

"Sensuality is the vice of young men and of old nations." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky

"If sensuality be our only happiness, we ought to envy the brutes; for instinct is a surer, shorter, safer guide to such happiness than reason." - Charles Caleb Colton

"The spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"Thoughts have a higher dwelling place than the visible world, and its skies are not clouded by sensuality. Imagination finds a road to the realm of the gods, and there man can glimpse that which is to be after the soul's liberation from the world of substance." - Kahlil Gibran

"Intellectual passion drives out sensuality." - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

"The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Love is a command, not just a feeling. Somehow, in the romantic world of music and theater we have made love to be what it is not. We have so mixed it with beauty and charm and sensuality and contact that we have robbed it of its higher call of cherishing and nurturing." - Ravi Zacharias, fully  Frederick Antony Ravi Kumar Zacharias

"Before man can be free, and equal, and truly wise, he must cast aside the chains of habit and superstition; he must strip sensuality of its pomp, and selfishness of its excuses, and contemplate actions and objects as they really are. He will discover the wisdom of universal love; he will feel the meanness and the injustice of sacrificing the reason and the liberty of his fellow-men to the indulgence of his physical appetites, and becoming a party to their degradation by the consummation of his own." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be... but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins? " - Remy de Gourmont

"After a long spell of prayer, do not say that nothing has been gained, for you have already achieved something. After all, what higher good is there than to cling to the Lord and to persevere in unceasing union with Him?" - John Climacus, fully Saint John Climacus, aka John of the Ladder, John Scholasticus and John Sinaites

"If you lend me your ears, I shall doubtless take your hearts too. That I may not lead you into any wrong, let me warn you of this. Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. Be true to your own mind and conscience, your heart and your soul. So only can you be true to God." - Theodore Parker