Carolina QuotesChastity — the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Ch. 27
- work
- Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
- year
- 1936
Cite this record
“Chastity — the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions,…” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E319C73C9F. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e319c73c9f
More from Aldous Huxley
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong.
Ever since his mother's second marriage Spandrell had always perversely made the worst of things, chosen the worst course, deliberately encouraged his own worst tendencies. It was with debauchery that he distracted his endless leisures. He was taking his revenge on her, on himself also for having been so foolishly happy and good. He was spiting her, spiting himself, spiting God. He hoped there was a hell for him to go to and regretted his inability to believe in its existence. Still, hell or no hell, it was satisfactory, it was even exciting in those early days to know that one was doing something bad and wrong. But there is in debauchery something so intrinsically dull, something so absolutely and hopelessly dismal, that it is only the rarest beings, gifted with much less than the usual amount of intelligence and much more than the usual intensity of appetite, who can go on actively enjoying a regular course of vice or continue actively to believe in its wickedness. Most habitual debauchees are debauchees not because they enjoy debauchery, but because they are uncomfortable when deprived of it. Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory — reason.