Some thoughts on men and women
You know that look that women get when they want to have sex? Me neither. – Steve Martin
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies. – P.G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money, 1916
“A woman’s always quicker than a man at such jobs as ’tater setting. They can bend easier, and they’re nimbler-handed nor we. My missis can pick peas twice as quick as I can. But there,” he added, in male extenuation, “a woman’s always handling ’taters, so she ought to know the way on’t.” – Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree, 1932
A woman in love is capable of anything. Exactly like a woman not in love. – Roberto Gervaso (1937-)
A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain. – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892
On the one hand, we’ll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open all our own jars. – Jeff Green, 1999
The true man wants two things: danger and diversion. Therefore he wants woman, the most dangerous plaything. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883
“When I speak of women,” said the doctor, “I speak of a sex so fragile, so variable, so changeable, so inconstant, and so imperfect … that Plato, you will recall, was at a loss where to class them. … For nature has placed in their bodies … certain humors, brackish, nitrous, boracious, acrid, mordant, shooting, and bitterly tickling … by which the entire feminine body is shaken … all senses ravished … all thought thrown into confusion … sometimes so violent that the woman is thereby deprived of all other senses and powers of motion as if she had suffered from heart failure, syncope, epilepsy, apoplexy, something like death.” – François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, c. 1532
“I was thinking”, he answered absently, “about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.” – Willa Cather, The Professor’s House, 1925
She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity. – Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”, 1955
A man experienced in dealing with the female sex knows that the policy to pursue, when a woman issues an order, is not to stand arguing but to acquiesce and then go off and disobey it. – P.G. Wodehouse, Ice in the Bedroom, 1961
A girl much given to dancing can hardly find acceptance in the eyes of a man of true delicacy. Such a man’s mind must revolt more or less at the idea of his mistress twirling round in the waltz, or quadrilling it with a set of fellows, the very touch of whose fingers upon her delicate person he must feel as a sort of sacrilege. For this reason, young ladies should dance little, or not at all, in the presence of their lovers. – Robert Macnish, Aphorisms, 1834