Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Eros? What other name may we give that impetus which becomes enchanted as soon as it casts its glance on matter and then longs to impress its features upon it? It confronts the body and longs to pass beyond it, to merge with the other erotic cry hidden in that body, to become one till both may vanish and become deathless by begetting sons. It approaches the soul and wishes to merge with it inseparably so that "you" and "I" may no longer exist; it blows on the mass of man — kind and wishes, by smashing the resistances of mind and body, to merge all breaths into one violent gale that may lift the earth! In moments of crisis this Erotic Love swoops down on men and joins them together by force — friends and foes, good and evil. It is a breath superior to all of them, independent of their desires and deeds. It is the spirit, the breathing of God on earth. It descends on men in whatever form it wishes — as dance, as eros, as hunger, as religion, as slaughter. It does not ask our permission.

Eros is a superhuman power which, like nature herself, allows itself to be conquered and exploited as though it were impotent. But triumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure. "Eros is a mighty daemon," as the wise Diotima said to Socrates. We shall never get the better of him, or only to our own hurt. He is not the whole of our inward nature, though he is at least one of its essential aspects.

I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I'm sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn't lust after Psyche.

Sex can be defined fairly adequately in physiological terms as consisting of the building up of bodily tensions and their release. Eros, in contrast, is the experiencing of the personal intentions and meaning of the act. Whereas sex is a rhythm of stimulus and response, eros is a state of being. The pleasure of sex is described by Freud and others as the reduction of tension; in eros, on the contrary, we wish not to be released from the excitement but rather to hang on to it, to bask in it, and even to increase it. The end toward which sex points is gratification and relaxation, whereas eros is a desiring, longing, a forever reaching out, seeking to expand.

Eros conquers depression.

Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt illusionibus. " For, isolated, Eros is in every sense the most treacherous counterfeit of love, sending a continual flow of self-deception and delusion throughout the world, etc.

He came to read; two or three books
are lying open: history and poetry.
But after just ten minutes of reading
he lets them drop. There on the sofa
he falls asleep. He truly is devoted to reading-
but he is twenty-three years old, and very handsome.
And just this afternoon, Eros surged
within his perfect limbs and on his lips.
Into his beautiful flesh came the heat of passion,
and there was no foolish embarrassment
about the form that pleasure took..

Ways of loving from a distance, mating without even touching-Amor platonicus! The ladder of love one is expected to climb higher and higher, elating the Self and the Other. Plato clearly regards any actual physical contact as corrupt and ignoble because he thinks the true goal of Eros is beauty. Is there no beauty in sex? Not according to Plato. He is after `more sublime pursuits.' But if you ask me, I think Plato's problem, like those of many others, was that he never got splendidly laid.

The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment … seems to result from a combination of causes—our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by “the death of God” and of the subordinate god, Eros.

Europeans used to say Americans were puritanical. Then they discovered that we were not puritans. So now they say that we are obsessed with sex.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.