“Rather than being a measure and consequence of the power of naturally occurring sexual desire, pornography is a measure of the extent to which people tend to prefer controlling desire through contrivance rather than being surprised by desire that spontaneously arises.”
Can Love Last? (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 137
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Stephen Mitchell 9
American psychologist 1946–2000Related quotes
Christian von Ehrenfels (1897, 3–4), as cited in: Robin Rollinger and Carlo Ierna, " Christian von Ehrenfels https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ehrenfels/", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

“Always in these matters desiring rather to be taught than to teach.”
Lectio 53.
Expositio Canonis Missae

Part I : Ambiguity and Freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Context: The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous. Man, Sartre tells us, is “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful. The word “useful” has not yet received a meaning on the level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the human world established by man’s projects and the ends he sets up. In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it can not give itself reasons for being that it does not have. And indeed Sartre tells us that man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be being. The term in order that clearly indicates an intentionality. It is not in vain that man nullifies being. Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship “wanting to be” but rather “wanting to disclose being.” Now, here there is not failure, but rather success.

Attributed

“Psychics exploit the human being's natural desire that longs for something higher than themselves.”
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“There is no desire more natural than the desire of knowledge.”

Letter 2.
Advice to Young Men (1829)