The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual stron...g, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat: the body would feast. The soul says, The man and the woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its own ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that at bottom they honor and love only themselves (or their own ...ideal, to express it more agreeably). Thus man wants woman to be peaceable--but woman is essentially, like the cat, not peaceable, however well she may have trained herself to assume the appearance of peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not likely,... let me live as I will, that I shall ever be a rich woman, if I am to live in America; the cost of one's exist...ence here is something fabulous, and the amount of discomfort one obtains for money, that purchases a liberal allowance of luxury as well as comfort in Europe, is by no means a small item of annoyance in one's daily life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that when manners are licentious, a revolution is always near: the virtue of woman being the main girth and bandage of ...society; because a man will not lay up an estate for children any longer than whilst he believes them to be his own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be womanly is one thing, and one only; it is to be sensitive to man, to be highly endowed with the sex instinct; to be manly is... to be sensitive to woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman." Strictly speaking, a ...woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes). Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give. No lover in the world ever sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a calculation, however unconscious, that they would be more pleasurable than those of any other woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fo...ols; and every wise man knows himself to be one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... my aim is now, as it has been for the past ten years, to make myself a true woman, one worthy of the name, and one who will un...shrinkingly follow the path which God marks out, one whose aim is to do all of the good she can in the world and not be one of the delicate little dolls or the silly fools who make up the bulk of American women, slaves to society and fashion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the ...twenty to follow mine own teaching.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What the essential difference between man and woman is, that they should be thus attracted to one another, no one has satisfactori...ly answered. Perhaps we must acknowledge the justness of the distinction which assigns to man the sphere of wisdom, and to woman that of love, though neither belongs exclusively to either. Man is continually saying to woman, Why will you not be more wise? Woman is continually saying to man, Why will you not be more loving? It is not in their wills to be wise or to be loving; but, unless each is both wise and loving, there can be neither wisdom nor love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »