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Quotes from Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson — Camille Paglia

born 1947 United States

← All quotes by Camille Paglia

76 quotes

The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Art advances by self-mutilation of the artist.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The moral ambivalence of the great mother goddesses has been conveniently forgotten by those American feminists who have resurrected them. We cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding our own blood.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Personality maintains its discreetness by an act of will. Otherwise one person will flow helplessly into another.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, the site of our biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Visionary idealism is a male art form. The lesbian aesthete does not exist. But if there were one, she would have learned from the perverse male mind.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan nature.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

The idea that the stars literally influence men (by a falling fluid, an influenza) is plainly untenable. But that the movements of the constellations are a clock by which earthly changes can be measured is less easy to dismiss.

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Camille Paglia (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.