1.
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female…In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness
Laura Mulvey
2.
Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love goes beyond the beloved... The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity, or again,the possibility of enjoying the Other... this simultaneity of need and desire, or concupiscence and transcendence,... constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence.
Emmanuel Levinas
3.
When people read erotic symbols into my painting, they're really thinking about their own affairs.
Georgia O'Keeffe
5.
Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.
Karl Kraus
6.
We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
Audre Lorde
7.
Erotic or sexual love can truly be love if it is not selfishly sexual or lustful.
Mortimer Adler
8.
Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.
Thomas Ligotti
9.
I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.
Alison Bechdel
10.
Erotic intelligence stretches far beyond a repertoire of sexual techniques. It is an intelligence that celebrates curiosity and play, the power of the imagination, and our infinite fascination with what is hidden and mysterious.
Esther Perel
12.
No erotic work of art is filth if it is artistically significant; it is only turned into filth through the beholder if he is filthy.
Egon Schiele
13.
An anagram of Axl Rose is oral sex. Why do I know? Because when I'm not playing music I love solving erotic jumbles.
Slash
14.
My best works are erotic displays of mental confusions.. with intrusions of irrelevant information.
Marlene Dumas
15.
I love Indian food - it's my favourite cuisine. I love the mixture of spices and the subtle flavours. It's really erotic; the spices are so sensuous.
Joe Perry
16.
A red rose peeping through a white? Or else a cherry (double graced) Within a lily? Centre placed? Or ever marked the pretty beam, A strawberry shows, half drowned in cream? Or seen rich rubies blushing through A pure smooth pearl, and orient too? So like to this, nay all the rest, Is each neat niplet of her breast.
Ovid
17.
I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?
Egon Schiele
18.
The truly erotic sensibility, in evoking the image of woman, never omits to clothe it. The robing and disrobing: that is the true traffic of love.
Antonio Machado
19.
The raging fire which urged us on was scorching us; it would have burned us had we failed to restrain it.
Giacomo Casanova
20.
All art is erotic. The first ornament to have been invented, the cross, was of erotic origin. It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down. A vertical stroke: the male who penetrates her.
Adolf Loos
21.
I am a big fan of vampires. I've always been obsessed with the genre, and the beautiful romanticism and erotic kind of nature of the immortal being, the undead who lives on human blood.
Alex O'Loughlin
22.
In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.
Nora Ephron
23.
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
Roland Barthes
24.
Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.
Jim Morrison
25.
Wonder is our erotic affiliation with all of life. If we develop this, enjoy it, and follow its promptings, our wants will be fewer and our needs plainer.
Stephanie Mills
26.
My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.
Nancy Mairs
27.
Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer; Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
William Shakespeare
28.
Erotic movies - they don't even make it anymore. Even the erotic magazines don't really look like the ones you could find in the '70s. You have much more extreme iconography of what is sexy. It's very cold. There's nothing that links to real life.
Gaspar Noe
29.
I am sensual and very physical. I'm very erotic. But my sexuality exists on a sort of a fantasy level.
Donna Summer
30.
Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. . . .
Audre Lorde
31.
At the moment my art is situated between the pornographic tendency to reveal everything and the erotic inclination to hide what it's all about.
Marlene Dumas
32.
By the mid 1920s the typical American town was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile.
John Leo
33.
Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.
Anne Waldman
34.
I make sure that my pictures are not too erotic and that they always have a trace of humor. I make sure they are ‘in good taste.’ Either you understand it or not.
Mel Ramos
35.
Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh.
Marge Piercy
36.
I need three million dollars to make a low-budget, intellectual, artistic, exciting, erotic movie with a great soundtrack.
Ray Manzarek
37.
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
Audre Lorde
38.
Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
Iris Murdoch
39.
The stiletto is the icon of erotic femininity. You're taller, thinner and curvier, all at the same time. What's not to like?
Valerie Steele
40.
A TV evening with the right person can be more erotic than sex with the wrong one.
Ville Valo
41.
Yes, my dolls were the beginning. Obviously there was a convulsive flavor to them because they reflected my anxiety and unhappiness. To an extent they represented an attempt to reject the horrors of adult life as it was in favor of a return to the wonder of childhood, but the eroticism was all-important, they became an erotic liberation for me.
Hans Bellmer
42.
I basically took something that was extremely erotic and very intentional, and I reduced it to a simple kiss. I got a lot of criticism for that.
Steven Spielberg
43.
I've done sexual stuff before - onstage, which is even more emotionally difficult. With a TV crew around, you are stopping and starting; it becomes really technical. It's not erotic at all.
Randy Harrison
44.
Behind every erotic condemnation there's a burning hypocrite.
Susie Bright
45.
A healthy man is content with a woman. An erotic man is content with a stocking to get to a woman. A sick man is content with thestocking.
Karl Kraus
46.
A good nude photograph can be erotic, but certainly not sentimental or pornographic.
Bill Brandt
47.
It is more erotic to wonder if you're about to be kissed than it is to be kissed.
Roger Ebert
48.
The common erotic project of destroying women makes it possible for men to unite into a brotherhood; this project is the only firm and trustworthy groundwork for cooperation among males and all male bonding is based on it.
Andrea Dworkin
49.
Once one has realized, following the great English literary visionaries William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe, that sexual puritanism, political disciplinarianism, and abuse of the poor are the result of the refusal of true Christianity ... one is led to articulate a more incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialized, even a more 'Platonic' Christianity.
John Milbank
50.
Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.
Jim Morrison