Source: Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl—A Woman's Guide to Holding Her Own in a Relationship
Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XVI : The Warning of Experience; Mrs. Maxwell to Helen
Context: Beauty is that quality which, next to money, is generally the most attractive to the worst kinds of men; and, therefore, it is likely to entail a great deal of trouble on the possessor.
“Novelty, the most potent of all attractions, is also the most perishable.”
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving
[2003, The Play of Masks, World Wisdom, 4, 978-0-94153214-3]
Spiritual life, Sense of the sacred
“There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.”
Home Fires (2011), Reflection 1
Fiction
“Intellect, like a woman's attraction, seduction and elegance, are innate qualities.”
Original: L'intelletto, come l'attrazione, seduzione ed eleganza di una donna, sono qualità innate.
Source: prevale.net
Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p. 13
volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", page 42 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=55&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)
"Eckhart, Brethren of the Free Spirit" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/communalism2.htm from Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1974), ch. 4
Context: St. Francis is not only the most attractive of all the Christian saints, he is the most attractive of Christians, admired by Buddhists, atheists, completely secular, modern people, Communists, to whom the figure of Christ himself is at best unattractive. Partly this is due to the sentimentalization of the legend of his life and that of his companions in the early days of the order. Many people today who put his statue in their gardens know nothing about him except that he preached a sermon to the birds, wrote a hymn to the sun, and called the donkey his brother. These bits of information are important because they are signs of a revolution of the sensibility — which incidentally was a metaphysical revolution of which certainly St. Francis himself was quite unaware. They stand for a mystical and emotional immediate realization of the unity of being, a notion foreign, in fact antagonistic, to the main Judeo-Christian tradition.
“I am that I am” — the God of Judaism is the only self-sufficient being. All the reality that we can know is contingent, created out of nothing, and hence of an inferior order of reality. Faced with the “utterly other,” the contingent soul can finally only respond with fear and trembling.
