
“There is a thin line between attraction and repulsion”
Source: Unknown Book 11676291
A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
Context: Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of spring, the passion of midsummer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness again, then the sharp stimulus of winter of the long nights. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.
“There is a thin line between attraction and repulsion”
Source: Unknown Book 11676291
Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Minds vary in sensitiveness and in self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction and repulsion. When, when shall we learn that they are governed by laws as inexorable as physical laws, and that a man can as easily refuse to obey what has power over him as a steel atom can resist the magnet?
Essays on Woman (1996), The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace (1932)
The Argument
1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)
Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 37
"Our Universal Civilization" in The New York Times (5 November 1990) https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/05/opinion/our-universal-civilization.html
Context: The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. … This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's Hindu parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.
“You assume that it has to be a male god who finds a human female attractive? How sexist is that?”
Source: The Lightning Thief
Source: So I think, so I paint (1947), p. 14; Cited in: Maurizio Scudiero, David Leiber, Fortunato Depero (1986) Depero futurista & New York: il futurismo e l'arte pubblicitaria, p. 112