“Our skin is provided as adequately as theirs with endurance against the assaults of the weather: witness so many nations who have not yet tried the use of any clothes. Our ancient Gauls wore hardly any clothes; nor do the Irish, our neighbors, under so cold a sky.”
Quote by Michel de Montaigne
“For all parts of the body that we see fit to expose to the wind and air are found fit to endure it: face, feet, hands, legs, shoulders, head, according as custom invites us. For if there is a part of us that is tender and that seems as though it should fear the cold, it should be the stomach, where digestion takes place; our fathers left it uncovered, and our ladies, soft and delicate as they are, sometimes go half bare down to the navel.”
Source: Complete Essays
“Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.”
Source: The Works of Michael de Montaigne: Comprising His Essays, Letters, and Journey Through Germany and Italy. With Notes from All the Commentators, Biographical and Bibliographical Notices &c., &c
“Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.”
Source: Mark Twain’s Book of Animals
“I suppose we acquire most of our feelings about our bodies too early, and in ways too complicated, to make them easy to account for.”
Source: Edward Weston: nudes : his photographs accompanied by excerpts from the daybooks & letters
“Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice.”
“How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?”
Source: KATHERINE MANSFIELD Premium Collection: 160+ Short Stories & Poems (Literature Classics Series): The Complete Short Stories and Poetry of Katherine Mansfield: Bliss, The Garden Party, The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish, In a German Pension, The Aloe, Poems at the Villa Pauline, Child Verses...
“This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been.”
Source: Tarzan Books 1 through 5
“For a time Jack was angry; but when he had been without the jacket for a short while he began to realize that being half-clothed is infinitely more uncomfortable than being entirely naked. Soon he did not miss his clothing in the least, and from that he came to revel in the freedom of his unhampered state.”
Source: Complete Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs: 70+ Adventure Classics & Science Fiction Novels (Illustrated): The Tarzan Series, The Barsoom Chronicles, The Pelucidar Series, Caspak Trilogy, The Moon Trilogy, The Venus Series, Westerns, Lost World Novels, Fantasy Classics, Historical Novels and more
“By now I was utterly deprogrammed. I walked along naked usually, clothes being not only putrid but unnecessary. My skin had been baked a deep terra-cotta brown and was the constituency of harness leather. The sun no longer penetrated it. I retained my hat.”
Source: Tracks
“The best dress for walking is nakedness. But our sad though fascinating world rarely offers the right and necessary combinations of weather and privacy, and even when it does the Utopia never seems to last very long.”
