on chastity

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ON CHASTITY

 

It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value

for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the

same time as Californians try to re-invent "celibacy," by which they seem to

mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high

value on chastity "backward."

Germaine Greer (b. 1939), Australian feminist writer. Sex and Destiny, ch. 4

(1984).

 

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us

unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the

flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the

like, are but various fruits which succeed it.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden,

"Higher Laws" (1854).