God cursed the snake, but it finds sustenance everywhere. God cursed the woman, but all men pursue her.
~ Talmud, Yoma, 75
Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the point of view of sex he felt much curiosity to know how far the woman was right, and, in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the trick of affirming that the woman was the superior. Apart from truth, he owed her at least that compliment.
~ Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams
Woman is the chain by which man is attached to the chariot of folly.
~ Bharitihari, in The Sringa Satak
Nothing enchants the soul so much as young women. They alone are the cause of evil and there is no other.
~ Bharitihari, in The Sringa Satak
Suffer women once to arrive at an equality with you, and they will from that moment become your superiors.
~ Marcus Porcius Cato
Thank heaven for little girls, for little girls get bigger every day!… They grow up in the most delightful way!
~ Maurice Chevalier
Woman–a foe of friendship, and inescapable punishment, a necessary evil.
~ Saint John Chrysostom
The man’s desire is for the woman; but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, the resent it.
~ Confucius, in Analects
Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius.
~ Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man
, ch. 8
And without partiality, a woman of sense and manners is the finest and most delicate part of God’s creation, the glory of her Maker, and the great instance of his singular regard to man, his darling creature, to whom he gave the best gift either God could bestow or man receive.
~ Daniel Defoe
Without women, the beginning of our life would be helpless; the middle devoid of pleasure; and the end, of consolation.
~ Victor Joseph Etienne DeJouy
Women are like elephants to me–I like to look at ’em, but I wouldn’t want to own one.
~ W. C. Fields
He who trusts women ploughs the wind, sows the barren sea, finds no the bottom of the barren ocean, writes his recollections in the snow, draws water like the Danaides, with pitchers full of holes.
~ Paul Flemin
A man of straw is worth more than a woman of gold.
~ John Florio, in Second Frutes
Man may escape from rope and gun;
Nay, some have outliv’d the doctor’s pill;
Who takes a woman must be undone,
That basilisk is sure to kill.
~ John Gay, in The Beggar’s Opera
To call women the weaker sex is a libel: it is man’s injustice to woman. If by stregnth is meant brute strength, then indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man’s superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrifincing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man would not be.
~ Mohandes Karamchand Gandhi
God made himself man: granted. The Devil made himself woman.
~ Victor Hugo, in Ruy Blas
The cleverness of men ends where the cleverness of women begins.
~ Henry James, in In the Cage
Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
~ Samuel Johnson
It is my joy that the female sex, far from being more imperfect than man, is on the contrary the most perfect.
~ Soren Kierkegaard, in Stages on Life’s Way
O why did god
Creator wise, that peopl’d highest Heav’n
With Spirits Masculine, create at last
This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect
Of Nature, and not fill the World at once
With Men as Angels without Feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind?
~ John Milton, in Paradise Lost
Woman is unspeakably more wicked than man, also cleverer.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo
When a woman turns to scholarship there is usually something wrong with her sexually.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil
A woman is only a lesser man.
~ Plato, in The Republic
Tacitast melior mulier semper quam loquens. [A woman is always worth more seen than heard.]
~ Plautus, in Rudens
The whole education of women should be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to win their love and esteem, to brink them up when young, to tend them when grown, to advise and console them, and to make life sweet and pleasant to them; these are the duties of woman at all times, and what they ought to learn from infancy.
~ Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile
Hence, it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice. This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the power of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are dependent not upon strength, but upon craft, and hence their incredible capacity for cunning, and their incredible tendency to say what is not true.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race, for the whole beauty of sex is bound up with this impulse. Instead of calling them beautiful, there would be more warrant for describing woman as the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have they really and truly any sense of susceptibility; it is mere mockery if they make a pretense of it in order to assist their endeavor to please.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Women are much more like each other than men; they have, in truth, but two passions, vanity and love; these are their universal characteristics.
~ Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Women, especially, are to be talked to, as below men, and above children.
~ Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
~ James Stephens, in The Crock of Gold
Women have tongues of craft, and hearts of guile,
They will; they will not; fools that on them trust;
For in their speech is death, hell in their smile.
~ Torquato Tasso, in Jerusalem Delivered, xix, 84
Men at most differ as heaven and earth,
But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in “Merlin and Vivien” line 812
If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people [Americans] ought to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.
~ Alexis De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America
, pt. II, bk. III, ch. 12
And do you not think that each of you women is an Eve? The judgement of God upon your sex endures even today; and with it inevitably endures your position of criminal at the bar of justice.
~ Tertullian, in The Apparel Of Women
, bk. 1, ch. 1
God created woman only to tame mankind.
~ Voltaire
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.
~ Charlotte Whitton
And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.
~ Bible, Genesis 2
