Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter De Vries

Leave it to a mid-century American comic novelist to make chastity sound not just joyless, but vaguely perverse. Peter De Vries's line works because it flips a familiar moral hierarchy: traditionally, "self-abuse" names masturbation, while celibacy gets marketed as virtue, discipline, even spiritual achievement. De Vries swaps the labels with a straight face, weaponizing prudish vocabulary against prudishness itself.

The joke isn't only sexual; it's about the cultural machinery that polices desire. By calling celibacy "the worst form", he implies that repression is not neutral restraint but an active harm you do to yourself. The phrase "self-abuse" is crucial: it keeps the act private and voluntary, undercutting the idea that abstinence is always imposed by high principle. De Vries suggests it can also be self-punishment dressed up as holiness, or a way to win social credit by refusing what you actually want.

Context matters. De Vries wrote in an America still humming with Protestant respectability, when public language around sex was euphemistic and guilt-soaked, even as postwar consumer culture quietly sold pleasure everywhere else. His wit slices through that double bind. It's also a pre-sexual-revolution grenade: a reminder that "virtue" can be a performance, and that the real obscenity may be a life spent treating natural appetite as a moral failing. The line lands because it's scandalously concise, and because it accuses the accuser.