The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass nights as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
God created the flirt as soon as he made the fool.
—Victor Hugo (1802–85) French Novelist
Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.
—Germaine Greer (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don’t see it—but there is.
—Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) South African Writer, Feminist
For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.
—Queen Victoria (1819–1901) British Royal
I think the worst woman that ever existed would have made a man of very passable reputation—they are all better than us and their faults such as they are must originate with ourselves.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
A man’s idea in a game of cards is war, cruel, devastating, and pitiless. A lady’s idea of it is a combination of larceny, embezzlement and burglary.
—Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) American Author, Writer, Humorist
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch. The barriers are ancient—perhaps rooted, as some paleontologist may soon discover, in the contrast between the occasional guttural utterances exchanged in male hunting bands and the extended discussions characteristic of female food-gathering groups.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b.1941) American Social Critic, Essayist
Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.
—Michael Korda (b.1933) English-born Writer, Novelist
There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
Were there no women, men might live like gods.
—Thomas Dekker
I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
—Gloria Steinem (b.1934) American Feminist, Journalist, Social Activist, Political Activist
Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) English Writer, Feminist
A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.
—Anita Brookner (1928–2016) English Novelist, Art Historian
I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one the things that women have is men.
—Coco Chanel (1883–1971) French Fashion Designer
He is half of a blessed man. Left to be finished by such as she; and she a fair divided excellence, whose fullness of perfection lies in him.
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616) British Playwright
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever.
—Anita Loos (1888–1981) American Actor, Novelist, Screenwriter
Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.
—Kate Millet (1934–2017) American Feminist, Writer, Sculptor
A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.
—Joyce Carol Oates (b.1938) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Playwright, Poet, Literary Critic
All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) French Writer
A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.
—Robert Frost (1874–1963) American Poet
If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they’d never marry.
—O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) (1862–1910) American Writer of Short Stories
A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.
—Colette (1873–1954) French Novelist, Performer