Now, since everything else is furnished with the exact amount of needle
and thread required to maintain its being, it is in truth incredible that
we alone should be brought into the world in a defective and indigent
state, in a state such that we cannot maintain ourselves without external
aid.
Montaigne, "On the custom of wearing clothes"
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.
Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebonde"
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.
Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebonde"
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.
Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebonde"
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.
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves,
of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions,
of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
Human bodies are words, myriads of words,
(In the best poems re-appears the body, man's or woman's, well-shaped, natural, gay,
Every part able, active, receptive, without shame or the need of shame.)
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
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.
Charis Wilson
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.
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes.
One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception
is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. The zoologist now has to
start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a premium.
Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape
It is so basic. A human being is an innocent part of nature. Our
civilization has distorted this universal quality that allows us to
feel at home in our skin. Other animals have coats that they accept,
but the human race has yet to come to terms with being nude.
Ruth Bernhard
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?
Katherine Mansfield
Whatever the reasons, I enjoyed being nude; it felt natural to me. I
got the same kind of pleasure from being free of clothing that many
people get from being well dressed.
Charis Wilson
Under the continual contact with the pebbles my feet have become
hardened and used to the ground. My body, almost constantly nude, no
longer suffers from the sun. Civilization is falling from me little by
little. I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred
for my neighbor - rather, to love him.
Paul Gauguin, Noa, Noa: The Tahitian Journal
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.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
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.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Son of Tarzan
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.
Robyn Davidson, 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.
Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker III
Now, nakedness is a delightful condition. And it keeps you
very pleasantly cool - especially, I suppose, if you happen
to be a man. But as I walked on eastward that afternoon
through my private, segregated, Tonto world (exercising due
care at first for previously protected sectors of my
anatomy) I found I had gained more than coolness. I felt a
quite unexpected freedom from restraint. And after a while I
found that I had moved on to a new kind of simplicity. A
simplicity that had a fitting, Adam-like, in-the-beginning
earliness about it.
Colin Fletcher, The Man Who Walked Through Time
By walking naked you gain far more than coolness. You feel an
unexpected sense of freedom from restraint. An uplifting and almost
delirious sense of simplicity. In this new simplicity you soon find
that you have become, in a new and surer sense, and integral part of
the simple, complex world you are walking through. And then you are
really walking.
Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker III
Freed from the pressure of haste, the tyranny of film,
and now the restraint of clothes, I found myself looking
more closely at what went on around me.
Colin Fletcher, The Man Who Walked Through Time
At pains to define liberty, that most resolute of
indefinables, our minds fall back on spatial images; on
birds, sailboats, and mountains; the untethered balloon, the
blue sky, the nude figure.
Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living
With a little inner pirouette of excitement I realised just
how much there was to look forward to tomorrow. The thought
of being all day naked in the sun was delicious enough in
itself, but there was the whole of our new world to explore.
Lucy Irvine, Castaway
In the first weeks I had occasionally worn clothes in the
morning before the sun began its ascent, but very soon I
abandoned this habit, and the only bit of material I ever
wore was the strip of sari cloth around my hips, which was
so useful for making into a bag to collect coconuts on
walks.
Lucy Irvine, Castaway
Last night I had rinsed out my sari strip and briefs in the
sea. I walked down naked to where they hung in the branches
of the silvery leafed tree beside the creek. Underneath the
lazy sensuality of a luxurious stretch from toes to nose I
felt the strong unequivocal demand of my blood. I hugged
myself for a moment watching the grey light yield to dawn
through half-closed eyes.
Lucy Irvine, Castaway
She lives a sophisticate's life among worldly people. At the
slightest excuse she steps out of civilization, naked and
relieved, as I should step out of a soiled chemise.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek
Bare skin is the one and only right criterion for receiving
water's gracious acceptance or any acceptance whatsoever
from that element. But Pliny also seems to say something
more: Stripping off not caution but the stale, crusty
garments of preconception, peeling sensibly down to raw, new
nakedness, is the only way to enter and be properly embraced
by the world.
Janet Lembke, Skinny Dipping
Human beings to me are as much a part of nature as trees or birds,
and the unclothed body expresses this belongingness directly and
powerfully.
Wynn Bullock
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked.
Walt Whitman
Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so
close to me... Nature was naked, and I was also... Sweet, sane, still
Nakedness in Nature! - ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might
really know you once more! Is not nakedness the indecent? No, not inherently.
It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability,
that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only
too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.
Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating
extasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible
(and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what
purity is--nor what faith or art or health really is.
Walt Whitman, A Sun-bathed Nakedness
The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire
or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's
flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not
explainable.
John Muir
Every day I am aware of the flow and constant change; perhaps I am at
the edge of discovering what more our bodies might be able to teach about
the spirit of life. At least, I am always exploring and trying to
understand our relationship to the whole universe.
Ruth Bernhard
The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I
hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind.
Mark Twain, Huckelberry Finn
The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no standard, and cannot
have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore
an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased
caprice.
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
The human body represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness
and purity of all seed pods, suggesting the mother as well as the child,
the parental as well as the descendant, conceived according to nature's
longings.
Ruth Bernhard
If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.
Walt Whitman, "I Sing The Body Electric"
To see you naked is to recall the Earth.
Federico Garcia Lorca
Significance is inherent in the human body.
Julia Kristeva
The body says what words cannot.
Martha Graham
Truth is, most of us contain a splashing, giggling,
squealing child who knows without thinking that bare skin
and water go together as wings go with air, roots with
earth, and the phoenix with incendiary sun. And innocence
belongs to us as it did to ancient Greek athletes, who never
wore clothes for their footraces or boxing matches but
rather oiled themselves until their nude bodies glistened in
the sunlight.
Janet Lembke, Skinny Dipping
Full nakedness! All joyes are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be
To taste whole joyes.
John Donne, "Elegie XIX"
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that
the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the
garment with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo
'Tis well - but, Artists! who can paint or write,
To draw the naked is your true delight:
That robe of quality so struts and swells,
None see what parts of nature it conceals.
Th' exactest traits of body or of mind,
We owe to models of an humble kind.
Alexander Pope, "Epistle to a Lady"
The painter is not an intellectual if, when he has painted a nude woman,
he gives us the idea that she is just about to put her clothes back on.
Odilon Redon
The Princess Borghese, Bonaparte's sister, who was no saint, sat to
Canova as a reclining Venus, and being asked if she did not feel a little
uncomfortable, replied, "No. There was a fire in the room."
William Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote Esq.R.A.
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the
unbeautiful. And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy,
you may find in them a harness and a drain. Would that you could meet
the sun and the wind with more of your body and less of your raiment.
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
In nakedness I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the
trappings of pretension.
Horatio Greenough
Men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what
they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional
honesty and nudity would burden them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others
and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an
object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates
the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on
display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Robert Graves, The Naked and the Nude