Marie Stopes

“ In the kisses and the hand-touch of the betrothed are a zest and exhilaration which stir the blood like wine. The two read poetry, listen entranced to music which echoes the songs of their pulses, and see reflected in each other's eyes the beauty of the world. In the midst of this celestial intoxication they naturally assume that, as they are on the threshold of their lives, so too they are in but the antechamber of their experience of spiritual unity. ”

“ From the body of the loved one's simple, sweetly colored flesh, which our animal instincts urge us to desire, there springs not only the wonder of a new bodily life, but also the enlargement of the horizon of human sympathy and the glow of spiritual understanding which one could never have attained alone. ”

“ In its most beautiful expression and sublimest manifestations, the celibate ideal has proclaimed a world-wide love, in place of the narrower human love of home and children. Many saints and sages, reformers, and dogmatists have modeled their lives on this ideal. But such individuals cannot be taken as the standard of the race, for they are out of its main current: they are branches which may flower, but never fruit in a bodily form. ”

“ The search for a mate is a quest for an understanding soul clothed in a body beautiful, but unlike our own.
In the modern world, those who set off on high endeavors or who consciously separate themselves from the ordinary course of social life, are comparatively few, and it is not to them that I am speaking. ”

“ If our race as a whole set out to pursue an ideal which must ultimately eliminate bodies together, it is clear that very soon we should find the conditions of our environment so altered that we could no longer speak of the human race. ”

“ He need not read my book, for it is written about, and it is written for, ordinary men and women, who feeling themselves incomplete, yearn for a union that will have power not only to make a fuller and richer thing of their own lives, but which will place them in a position to use their sacred trust as creators of lives to come.
It has happened many times in human history that individuals have not only been able to conquer this natural craving for a mate, but have set up celibacy as a higher ideal. ”

“ But I would proclaim that we are set in the world so to mold matter that it may express our spirit; that it is presumption to profess to fight the immemorial laws of our physical being, and that he who does so loses unconsciously the finest flux in which wondrous new creations take their rise. ”

“ Very few are actually so cynical as to marry without the hope of happiness; while most young people, however their words may deny it and however they may conceal their tender hopes by an assumption of cynicism, reveal that they are conscious of entering on a new and glorious state by their radiant looks and the joyous buoyancy of their actions. ”

“ In sooth, a happy prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain nobler races, now very dimly imagined. ”

“ The most complete human being is he or she who consciously or unconsciously obeys the profound physical laws of our being in such a way that the spirit receives much help and as little hindrance from the body as possible. A mind or spirit finds its fullest expression thwarted by the misuse or the gross abuse of the body in which it dwells. ”

“ In this world our spirits not only permeate matter but find their only expression through its medium. So long as we are human we must have bodies, and bodies obey chemical and physiological, as well as spiritual laws. ”

“ Many reading this may feel conscious that they have had physical union without such spiritual accompaniments, perhaps even without an accession of ordinary pleasure. If that is so, it can only be because, consciously or unconsciously, they have broken some of the profound laws which govern the love of man and woman. Only by learning to hold a bow correctly can one draw music from a violin. Only by obedience to the laws of the lower plane can one step up to the plane above. ”

“ It may even be that the reader's departure from the ordinary ranks of mankind is still more fundamental, in which case, instead of sitting in judgment on the majority, he would do well to read some such books as those of Forel, Havelock Ellis, Bloch, or Krafft-Ebing, in order that his own nature may be made known to him. He may then discover to which type of our widely various humanity he belongs. ”

“ It may chance that some one into whose hands this book falls may protest that he or she has never felt the fundamental yearning to form a part of that trinity which alone is the perfect expression of humanity. ”

“ That there should exist one other person in the world towards whom all openness of interchange should establish itself, from whom there should be no concealment; whose body should be as dear to one, in every part, as one's own ”

“ By the ignorant or self-indulgent breaking of fundamental laws, the deepest harmonies are dislocated. The small-minded ascetic endeavors to grow spiritually by destroying his physical instincts instead of by using them. ”