And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed.

Genesis 2:25

It would be nice to live in a society where the genitals were really considered beautiful. It seems to me any other way of seeing is obscene. After all, there they are. Why not like them?

Carol Emshwiller

The power pervades the universe. It whirls the galaxies on their paths, it blossoms as the rose, it shines in beauty when man meets woman.

Rick Strauss

The soul, like the body, lives by what it feeds on.

Josiah Gilbert Holland

Along came Paul, impotent old fussbudget. He could eat like a horse, but for some reason he either couldn’t or wouldn’t function sexually, or took no pleasure in it if he did. So sex became a sin.

Jack Woodford

Where does one person end and another person begin?

Iris Murdoch

Love and life cannot help but marry and stay married with an exhausting violence of fidelity.

Kate O’Brien

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

George Bernard Shaw

There’s always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

D. H. Lawrence

The classical tradition of striptease . . . offers a valid metaphor for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is indefinitely postponed.

David Lodge

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nudists are fond of saying that when you come right down to it, everyone is alike, and, again, that when you come right down to it, everyone is different.

Diane Arbus

Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your Bible, your encyclopedia, your life story. Everything that happens to you is stored and reflected in your body. Your body knows; your body tells. The relationship of your self to your body is indivisible, inescapable, unavoidable. In the marriage of flesh and spirit, divorce is impossible, but that doesn’t mean that the marriage is necessarily happy or successful.

Gabrielle Roth

I am a little world.

John Donne

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Susan Sontag

Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature — if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you — know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.

Henry David Thoreau

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

F. H. Bradley

Body and soul are twins: God only knows which is which.

Charles A. Swinburne