Skip to main content

Daily Inspiration Quote by Mortimer Adler

"One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union"

About this Quote

Adler’s phrasing lands like a scholastic syllogism dressed up as a bedroom observation: sex is not merely pleasure or companionship but an act with built-in teleology. “One of the aims” quietly concedes plurality, yet it also reasserts hierarchy. Procreation is named first and defined with meticulous redundancy (“creation by reproduction”), as if he’s shoring up a contested premise. The subtext is unmistakably mid-century: modernity is loosening the link between sex and childbearing, and Adler is trying to stitch it back together with philosophical thread.

The kicker is his metaphysical flourish: the child as “an image of itself, of the union.” That’s a Thomistic move, less biology than ontology. He’s not arguing that a baby resembles its parents in the genetic sense; he’s claiming that the couple’s unity becomes legible, almost incarnate, in a third person. The rhetoric turns reproduction into representation: the union produces a symbol of the union. It’s a seductive reframing because it sanctifies the messy, contingent facts of family life into a coherent story about meaning.

Context matters: Adler was a leading popularizer of classical philosophy and natural-law moral reasoning, a thinker comfortable treating human acts as purposive rather than purely expressive. In an era moving toward contraception, sexual liberation, and the idea of sex as self-actualization, this line reads as a counter-program: not prudish exactly, but insistent that intimacy has public, generational consequences. The charm and the provocation are the same: he makes procreation sound less like obligation and more like a philosophical completion of the couple’s claim to be “one.”

Quote Details

TopicRelationship
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Adler, Mortimer. (2026, January 18). One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-aims-of-sexual-union-is-procreation--17709/

Chicago Style
Adler, Mortimer. "One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-aims-of-sexual-union-is-procreation--17709/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"One of the aims of sexual union is procreation - the creation by reproduction of an image of itself, of the union." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-aims-of-sexual-union-is-procreation--17709/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Mortimer Add to List
Mortimer Adler on Procreation and the Meaning of Sexual Union
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

USA Flag

Mortimer Adler (December 28, 1902 - June 28, 2001) was a Philosopher from USA.

33 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

James Broughton, Director
Fannie Hurst, Writer