Here's a few pertinent quotes I've collected regarding clothing, the state of nudity or peoples attitudes towards it. Some are inspirational, others downright silly!

We shift and bedeck and bedrape us,
Thou art noble and nude and antique.
A. C. Swinburne (1837-1909), English poet, critic. Dolores, st. 7.

In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.
Robert Bresson (b. 1907), French film director.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.
F. H. Bradley (1846-1924), English philosopher. Aphorisms, no. 88 (1930).

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. . . . The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
John Berger (b. 1926), British critic. Ways of Seeing, ch. 3 (1972).

Nudity is the uniform of the other side . . . nudity is a shroud.
Milan Kundera (b. 1929), Czech author, critic. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, pt. 7, ch. 8 (1978; tr. 1980).

I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), British author. Pornography and Obscenity (1930; repr. in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, pt. 3, ed. by E. McDonald, 1936).

To see you naked is to recall the Earth.
Federico García Lorca (1899-1936), Spanish poet, playwright. Casida de la Mujer Tendida.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike (b. 1932), U.S. novelist, critic. On the Vineyard, "Going Barefoot" (1980; repr. in Hugging the Shore, 1983).

Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither.
Hebrew Bible. Job, in Job 1:21. Almost identical words are used in Aesop's Fables, no. 120, written in the 6th century B.C.

Full nakedness! All my joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys.
John Donne (c. 1572-1631), English divine, metaphysical poet. Elegies, "To His Mistress Going to Bed" (1669), composed 1590-1600.

To be sure an European woman would blush to her fingers' ends at the very idea of appearing publicly stark naked; but education and prejudice are everything, since it is an axiom, that where there is no feeling of self-reproach, there can assuredly be no shame.
Captain J. G. Stedman (1744-97), British soldier, author, artist. Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, ch. 15 (1796; repr. 1971), referring to the Indians of Surinam.

But even the President of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.
Bob Dylan (b. 1941), U.S. singer, songwriter. "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," on the album Bringing it all Back Home (1965).

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.
William Blake (1757-1827), English poet, painter, engraver. Notes on The Laocoön (engraved c. 1820; repr. in Complete Writings, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes, 1957).

By this you may see who are the rude and barbarous Indians: for verily there is no savage nation under the cope of Heaven, that is more absurdly barbarous than the Christian World. They that go naked and drink water and live upon roots are like Adam, or Angels in comparison of us.
Thomas Traherne (1636-74), English clergyman, poet, mystic. Centuries, "Third Century," no. 12 (written c. 1672; first published 1908).

We live in an atmosphere of shame. 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 (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Tanner, in Man and Superman, act 1.

In order to swim one takes off all one's clothes-in order to aspire to the truth one must undress in a far more inward sense, divest oneself of all one's inward clothes, of thoughts, conceptions, selfishness etc. before one is sufficiently naked.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Danish philosopher. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard: A Selection, no. 1395, (ed. and tr. by Alexander Dru, 1938), entry for 1854.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Walden, "Economy" (1854).

The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: "Look what I killed. Aren't I the best?"
Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948), British fashion designer. Independent on Sunday (London, 10 March 1991).

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist. Orlando, ch. 4 (1928).

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. "Some Criticisms of the Exhibitions," in Amateur Photographer (London, 16 Oct. 1902; repr. in Bernard Shaw on Photography, 1989).

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
Unless it's a nudist society and the naked people are the committee - Koenig

I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.
Shelley Winters (1922 - )

There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.
Agnes Repplier (1855 - 1950)

I've posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin's Thinker, but I merely looked constipated.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Nudists have no fashion sense.
Peter Kunkel

In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked.
Warren Buffett (1930 - )

Immorality then, for the purpose of the law, is what every right-minded person is presumed to consider to be immoral.
Lord Patrick Devlin
Heaven help us! Here's hoping the "right-minded" folk are open-minded as well! - Koenig

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
Genesis 2:25

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
Romans 8:35

Because God created it the human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve its splendour and its beauty.
Pope John Paul II

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

Khalil Gibran - quote from "The Prophet"
On Clothes
And the weaver said, "Speak to us of Clothes."
And he answered:
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 chain.
Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment,
For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind.
Some of you say, "It is the north wind who has woven the clothes to wear."
But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.
And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

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