I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.
If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.
Anti-theses.- The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish is the even more celebrated 'love thy neighbor as thyself'. - In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun.
A man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year. Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the repulsion, always different, always new.
Brandon is just the kind of man whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.
If a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood.
[On religion:] Wasn't it invented by man for a kind of solace? It's as though he had said, 'I'll make me a nice comfortable garment to shut out the heat and the cold,' and then it ends by becoming a strait-jacket.
Woman in the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacities. She has the right to participate in the minutest details in the activities of man, and she has equal right to liberty of freedom and liberty with him.
And we shall most likely be defeated, and you will most likely be victors in the contest, if you learn so to order your lives as not to abuse or waste the reputation of your ancestors, knowing that to a man who has any self-respect, nothing is more dishonourable than to be honoured, not for his own sake, but on account of the reputation of his ancestors.
We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.
It is more difficult to research women's lives than it is men's. There has always been a tendency - race notwithstanding - to believe that women's contributions have been less important than men's contributions because women are usually less public people.