“This conflict between the powers of love and chastity … it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure…. But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge — if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.”

De toutes les aberrations sexuelles, la plus singulière est peut-être encore la chasteté.
Remy de Gourmont, La Physique de l'Amour: Essai sur l'Instinct Sexuel (1903), ch. 18: La question des aberrations http://books.google.com/books?id=32ZJAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA233&dq=%22De+toutes+les+aberrations+sexuelles%22&lr=&ei=6TXvR9yOM4zGyATqjfX4Bw.
Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love (1922), the Ezra Pound translation of La Physique de l'Amour: Essai sur l'Instinct Sexuel
Misattributed
Variant: Of all sexual aberrations, perhaps the most curious is chastity.

#831
The Furrow (1986)

Source: Hearts in Atlantis

Attributed

VIII, 7
Confessions (c. 397)
Context: As a youth I prayed, "Give me chastity and continence, but not right now."

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (March 27, 1894)
Letters

George Santayana, as quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977) edited by Laurence J. Peter
Other works

Volume iii, p. 332
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Ch'aver può donna al mondo più di buono,
A cui la castità levata sia?
Canto VIII, stanza 42 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)