Erotism: Death & Sensuality

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it

In order to reach the limits of ecstasy in which we lose ourselves in bliss we must always set an immediate boundary to it: horror. Not only can pain, my own or that of other people, carry me nearer to the moment when horror will seize hold of me and bring me to a state of bordering on delirium, but there is no kind of repugnance whose affinity with desire I do not discern

Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality

Eroticism has a sacramental character, but the physical and the emotional are to be met with outside the religious sphere proper, while the quest for continuity of existence systematically pursued beyond the immediate world signifies an essentially religious intention

Human sexual activity is not necessarily erotic but erotic 

it is whenever it is not rudimentary and purely animal.

My first words may make the unwary reader think that 

we have in mind some intellectual adventure.

I do not think that man has much chance of throwing light in 

the things that terrify him before he has dominated them.

Sexuality with shame ... gave birth to eroticism ...