Passages about women and men

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

Many things are terrible and wonderful, and nothing is more terrible and wonderful than man.

I was not born to share in hatred, but to share in love.

Dionysus opens the play by naming himself, saying he has come to Thebes disguised as a man because his mother's sisters denied that Zeus fathered him and called her death a punishment for a lie.

Tiresias tells Pentheus that the new god gives wine, which relieves men of pain and gives them sleep, and that a city gains nothing by fighting a power it cannot see.

The desire and pursuit of the whole is what we call love.

Love is not a god and not a mortal, but something in between, a spirit born of Poverty and Resource, always needy, always scheming, never rich and never destitute.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage.

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe

That to the height of this great argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.

Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay. But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added.

What is the meaning of life? That was all, a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

Of all creatures that have breath and understanding, we women are the most wretched.

I would rather stand three times in the line of battle than give birth once.

My tongue swore, but my mind is unsworn.

We know the good and recognise it, but we do not work it out, some from idleness, and some from preferring some other pleasure to the good.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.

I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on th' other.

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.

Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but in relation to himself.

He seems to me equal to the gods, that man who sits opposite you and hears you speaking sweetly and laughing. It makes the heart in my breast take flight.

Some say an army of horsemen, some of foot soldiers, some of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth; but I say it is whatever one loves.

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

Her limbs grew heavy and numb, a thin bark closed over her breast, her hair became leaves, her arms branches; her feet, so swift a moment before, stuck fast in sluggish roots.

I am not what I am.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

It was badly done, indeed!

She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was Papa's doll-child.

Millions of women have done so.

We must give up sex altogether. Why are you turning away? Where are you going? Why are you biting your lips and shaking your heads? Why have you gone pale?

First we wash the fleece to get the muck out. You should do the same with the city: beat out the scoundrels, pick off the burrs, card the ones who clump together for office, and comb the whole lot into one basket.

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

For I, that God of Loves servantz serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse, Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve.

I am myn owene womman, wel at ese.

All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.

She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.

She was so innocent that when I asked her what was troubling her, she answered that the kitten had died.

Marriage, Agnes, is no laughing matter. The duties of a wife are strict, and the position I am raising you to is not one of pleasure and liberty.

In Italy six hundred and forty; in Germany two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one; but in Spain, in Spain already one thousand and three.

Give me your hand, and say yes. It is not far; let us go from here.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

I often think I have only one talent in the world, and that is a talent for boring myself to death.

For once in my life I want to have power over a human destiny.

If I go through the fire I shall go through it to their hearts for ever and ever. And so, God be with me!

You promised me my life; but you lied. You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture, not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.

In its relation to the id the ego is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces.

The hymn opens by praising Inanna as mistress of all the divine powers, clothed in terror, the great lady who makes heaven tremble and earth quake, a goddess whose dominion extends over war and destruction as fully as over any other domain of divine power.

Enheduanna describes being driven from her temple by the rebel Lugal-Ane, who strips her of her office and her regalia, and states that she called out to her own god Nanna for help and received no answer, as if he did not care that his own priestess had been so thoroughly humiliated.

Hecuba learns that her daughter Cassandra, the prophetess whose warnings no one ever believed, has been allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine, a fate Cassandra herself receives not with despair but with a wild, prophetic joy the other characters find deeply unsettling.

Andromache, widow of Hector, learns she is being given to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, the very man responsible for her husband's death, and must accept this fate while still grieving Hector and now facing the additional horror of her young son's impending execution.

The male provides the form and the principle of movement, the female provides the body and the material; it is like the coagulation of milk, where the rennet acts on the milk to give it form.

The female is as it were a deformed male, and the menstrual discharge is semen, though not pure semen, for it lacks one thing only, the principle of soul.

Marie names herself directly as the author of these twelve lais, stating that she is retelling stories she heard from Breton minstrels, a claimed source that frames her considerable shaping intelligence as preservation and translation rather than pure invention.

In Bisclavret, a knight who is secretly a werewolf is betrayed by his own wife, who steals his clothes to trap him permanently in wolf form, and the tale's actual moral center rests not in his lycanthropy itself but in her specific betrayal of his trust.

It is time, sister, if you are not sleepy, to tell us one of your lovely little stories to while away the night.

Morning now dawned and Shahrazad broke off from what she had been allowed to say.

At Arthur's New Year feast a huge green knight offers to take a blow from an axe if the striker will accept one in return a year later, Gawain beheads him, and the knight picks up his head and rides off, establishing the poem's central binding wager.

At a castle on the way, a lord proposes to exchange each day's winnings while the lady of the house tries to seduce him, and Gawain accepts a green girdle said to protect him and hides it, a single significant lapse within otherwise scrupulous honor.

I began to examine myself and my behavior as a natural woman, and similarly I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, and I could not see or realize, after taking real note of it, that the testimony of so many notable men could be false.

Reason tells her that the surest way to refute those who attack women is to prove, by manifest deduction and demonstrable examples, both past and present, that a great number of women have always devoted themselves to learning and the arts.

In a framing scene a drunken tinker is tricked into thinking he is a lord and shown a play, destabilizing the entire main narrative's status from the outset and inviting audiences to question how the following comedy should actually be received.

The fortune-hunter Petruchio takes the job, marries Kate against her will and subjects her to a regime of hunger, sleeplessness and contradiction until she submits, staging psychological domination with unusual explicit detail within a comic framework.

Hermia, ordered by her father to marry Demetrius, runs into the woods outside Athens with Lysander, followed by Demetrius and by Helena, who loves him, establishing the tangled romantic pursuit the woods' magic will further complicate.

Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, are quarrelling over a changeling boy, and Oberon's servant Puck misapplies a love potion, the lovers' affections tangle, and the weaver Bottom is given an ass's head and Titania's love.

To finance his friend Bassanio's courtship of the heiress Portia, the merchant Antonio borrows from the Jewish moneylender Shylock, whom he has long abused, and agrees in jest to forfeit a pound of his flesh if he defaults on the loan.

Bassanio wins Portia by choosing the right casket, but Antonio's ships are lost and Shylock demands the bond, converting the romantic plot's happy resolution into direct confrontation with the financial crisis threatening Antonio's actual life.

Returning from war to Messina, the young lord Claudio falls for Hero, the governor's daughter, while Benedick and Hero's cousin Beatrice resume a running battle of insults their friends will need only manipulate into acknowledged mutual attraction.

The prince's bastard brother Don John stages a scene that makes Claudio think Hero is unfaithful, and Claudio denounces her at the altar, staging a genuinely brutal public humiliation the play's title ironically frames as much ado about nothing.

In the seventh year of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Troilus loves Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greeks, and her uncle Pandarus brings them together, staging romance within a war already grinding well past its initial heroic excitement.

The next morning Cressida is traded to the Greek camp for a prisoner, and Troilus watches from hiding as she gives herself to the Greek Diomedes, staging betrayal witnessed rather than merely reported and forcing the audience to share his devastating position.

The Duke of Vienna pretends to leave the city and hands power to the strict deputy Angelo, then stays behind disguised as a friar to watch, allowing him to observe his own city's actual moral condition and his deputy's real character firsthand.

Angelo revives a dormant law and condemns Claudio to death for getting his fiancée pregnant, and offers to spare him if Isabella sleeps with him, revealing absolute power's genuine corrupting potential with unusual directness.

Oh, that thou hadst been so happy to have died before this hour.

I am no man, but the poor shadow of a maid that loved you, and to follow you disguised, took this way of Bellario.

Leontes, king of Sicilia, suddenly convinces himself that his pregnant wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, staging jealousy as genuinely irrational psychological eruption rather than response to actual evidence.

He imprisons Hermione, has the newborn daughter abandoned on the Bohemian coast, and learns from the oracle that he was wrong just as his son and, apparently, his wife die, one man's delusion inflicting cascading harm across his entire family.

The widowed Duchess secretly marries her steward Antonio, wooing him herself since he cannot woo her, against the wishes of her brothers, who have set the malcontent Bosola to spy on her.

Ferdinand torments the imprisoned Duchess with a dead man's hand, wax figures of her husband and children, and a chorus of madmen, and then has Bosola strangle her, her children and her maid; she dies saying, I am Duchess of Malfi still.

Elisabeth asks Descartes directly how the soul, being only a thinking substance, can determine the movement of the bodily spirits in order to perform voluntary actions, given that all determination of movement seems to require either physical contact or some quality belonging to matter, neither of which the soul, as Descartes describes it, actually possesses.

Descartes replies with an account of the soul and body as forming a genuine, primitive union that cannot be fully explained through the same concepts used to explain interaction between two separate physical bodies, an answer Elisabeth continues to press without ever declaring herself satisfied.

The satirical poem Hombres necios turns on men who blame women for the faults men cause, staking out a genuinely early and pointed feminist critique exposing a specific logical hypocrisy in gendered moral judgment with considerable wit and precision.

The long philosophical poem First Dream traces the soul's rise by night toward total knowledge and its fall back, staging intellectual ambition's genuine limits, human aspiration toward complete understanding meeting reality's actual epistemic constraints.

Mirabell asks Millamant to submit to certain conditions before he asks her to marry him, and she answers that she will not be called names after she is married, dwindling into a wife, and that she may by degrees dwindle into a wife, but she will not begin.

Millamant demands the liberty to write and receive letters without interrogation, to come and go as she pleases, to pay and receive visits when and to whom she pleases, to have no obligation to converse with wits she does not like, and never to be called by any fond diminishing name after she is married.

Belinda wakes, is warned in a dream by the sylph Ariel, dresses at her toilet as a hero arms for battle, and sails up the Thames to Hampton Court, staging the elaborate rituals of feminine self-presentation with mock-epic gravity and formal ceremony.

After coffee and a game of cards, the Baron snips Belinda's lock with a pair of scissors, and the gnome Umbriel fetches spleen from the underworld, escalating this trivial social offense into a battle of fans and frowns among the assembled company.

Two Persian noblemen, Usbek and Rica, travel to Paris in 1712 and describe French customs, religion, politics and fashions to friends at home with the puzzled candour of outsiders, mocking the Pope, the king, the financier John Law and the Academy.

Interleaved among the Parisian letters are letters from Usbek's harem in Isfahan, where his prolonged absence loosens the eunuchs' control over his wives, and the wives themselves begin to rebel against the domestic order Usbek left in place.

Rousseau argues that children should learn from things and experience rather than from books and precepts, that reasoning comes late, and that the aim is a man who is at once natural and fit to live among others, a considerable pedagogical challenge to inherited tradition.

This treatise on education is cast as the story of an imaginary pupil, Emile, raised by a tutor from infancy to marriage, letting Rousseau work out his educational theory through sustained fictional narrative rather than only abstract prescription.

Major von Tellheim, discharged from military service and under suspicion of dishonesty despite his actual innocence, has broken off his engagement to Minna von Barnhelm specifically because he refuses to bring a ruined name into marriage, treating his compromised reputation as a genuine barrier rather than something love alone could overcome.

Minna arrives in Berlin searching for Tellheim, and when direct argument fails to move him from his stubborn position, she tricks him by pretending she too has been disinherited, restoring symmetry to their circumstances so that his own sense of honor now obliges him to marry her rather than continuing to refuse.

Tony Lumpkin, delighting in mischief, misdirects the traveling Marlow and his friend Hastings, convincing them that the Hardcastle family home is actually a country inn, a prank that sets the entire subsequent plot of mistaken identity and comic misunderstanding in motion.

Marlow, believing Mr. Hardcastle to be an innkeeper rather than his own prospective father-in-law, treats the older man with an easy, presumptuous familiarity entirely unlike the deference he would show if he understood the actual social relationship between them, producing sustained comic confusion neither man is able to resolve for some time.

Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights, de Gouges declares in her opening article, directly echoing and rewriting the 1789 Declaration's own opening statement about the rights of man.

Woman has the right to mount the scaffold, de Gouges writes; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum, provided her demonstrations do not disturb public order as established by law.

Condorcet asks by what right men, half of humanity, have excluded women, the other half, from participation in framing the laws they are equally bound to obey, and finds no rational or just answer that would not equally justify excluding some men from the same rights.

He argues that the abolition of slavery is not a matter of gradual accommodation to be delayed for practical convenience, but an immediate demand of justice that admits no legitimate exception or postponement.

Hansel and Gretel, abandoned in the forest by parents who can no longer feed them, follow a trail of breadcrumbs that birds eat before they can retrace their steps, and are lured by hunger to a house made of bread, cake and sugar belonging to a witch who intends to eat them.

Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters mutilate their own feet, cutting off toe and heel, in a failed attempt to fit the golden slipper, and at the wedding birds peck out the stepsisters' eyes as punishment for their cruelty, a considerably harsher conclusion than most later popular versions retain.

I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, / 'Tis woman's whole existence.

Count Francesco Cenci, a nobleman whose crimes the Pope repeatedly pardons for money, celebrates the deaths of two of his sons and then rapes his daughter Beatrice, escalating cruelty that institutional authority has repeatedly enabled rather than restrained.

With her stepmother and brother, Beatrice hires assassins to kill her father, choosing private violence as the only available response after institutional authority has repeatedly failed to check or punish his crimes against her and her family.

Stendhal distinguishes passionate love, mannered love, physical love and vanity love, describing the seven stages by which a person falls in love, the second of which he names crystallisation, giving romantic experience precise analytical vocabulary.

Crystallisation is the process by which the mind covers the beloved with perfections as a bare branch left in a salt mine comes out covered with crystals, offering a genuinely memorable and psychologically acute account of how idealization actually operates.

In certain provincial houses there are faces marked by no more expression than is on the face of an ox at pasture, and it is thus that the town of Saumur described the face of old Grandet.

Gold in itself is nothing, said Grandet, it is only good for turning into gold.

Lisbeth Fischer, being still unmarried at forty-two, was nicknamed Cousin Bette in the family.

Vice always finds a defender to plead for it, whereas virtue, when it has no reward, finds nothing but incredulity.

Hester Prynne stands on the public scaffold before the assembled town, the scarlet letter A sewn conspicuously onto her chest, refusing under repeated pressure to name the father of her child, absorbing the community's full public judgment alone rather than implicating Dimmesdale.

Roger Chillingworth arrives in Boston under an assumed name, discovers his wife Hester's public shame and correctly suspects the minister Dimmesdale's involvement, and rather than exposing him publicly devotes himself entirely to a sustained, secret campaign of psychological torment against the guilt-wasted minister.

She answered ministers who claimed women were too weak for rights by pointing to her own labour in the fields, ploughing and reaping as much as any man, and to the children she had borne and seen sold away.

She argued from scripture that Christ came from God and a woman, and that man had nothing to do with him, turning the ministers' own book against their claim.

On the Sufferings of the World argues that pain is the positive fact of life and pleasure only its absence, inverting the ordinary common-sense assumption about which condition requires explanation and treating suffering as existence's fundamental default state.

On the Vanity of Existence and On Suicide engage directly with self-destruction as a genuine philosophical question rather than a topic requiring polite avoidance, treating existence's fundamental worthlessness as demanding honest confrontation rather than comfortable denial.

Taking the standing of woman as citizen, as wife, as widow and as mother in turn, Stanton shows that women are taxed and tried without representation, and that on marriage a wife loses her property, her earnings, her name and the custody of her children.

She argues from the Declaration of Independence and the common law and demands the vote and legal equality, grounding her demand in both America's own founding revolutionary principles and in the accumulated technical legal tradition.

Eliot pauses the narrative directly to defend her own method, insisting that she would rather represent men and women as they actually are, in all their imperfection, than paint them as ideally beautiful or ideally wicked, since it is the ordinary, flawed people among whom most readers actually live their own lives.

Hetty Sorrel, vain and shallow in ways Eliot never disguises or excuses, is seduced by the young squire Arthur Donnithorne, and when she discovers herself pregnant and abandoned, flees rather than face her family's judgment, wandering until she finally abandons her newborn child.

Jacobs describes how her owner, Dr Flint, began sexually pursuing her at the age of fifteen, a pursuit she could not escape through ordinary means given her legal status as his property, establishing the specific sexual danger that drives the narrative's subsequent choices and actions.

Jacobs takes a white lover and bears two children by him, a calculated decision made specifically to escape Dr Flint's ongoing sexual pursuit, a choice she narrates with unflinching honesty despite knowing it would expose her to considerable moral judgment from contemporary readers.

Of Kings' Treasuries argues that books are the company of the best minds and that the English do not read, valuing wealth and advancement over education, a considerable indictment of Victorian materialism delivered through reading's neglected transformative power.

Of Queens' Gardens describes the separate powers of men and women, assigning women the guardianship of the home and of moral order, and calls for girls to be educated to fit them for it, a specifically Victorian gender ideology given eloquent expression.

Mill argues that the legal subordination of women to men is a survival of the law of force, the last relic of a world in which the strong simply ruled the weak, and that it should be replaced by perfect equality before the law rather than merely reformed or softened in its application.

Mill attacks the claim that women's present character shows their true nature, since that character has itself been produced by the very conditions of subordination under discussion, a circular argument that had let contemporaries treat subordination's own effects as proof of its underlying natural justification.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and the novel opens on the Oblonsky household thrown into confusion by the husband's affair with the governess.

Anna, married to a senior official in Petersburg, falls in love with the officer Vronsky, leaves her husband and son for him, and is slowly destroyed by society's exclusion and her own jealousy, until she throws herself under a train.

Breuer and Freud's joint preliminary communication of 1893 states that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences, proposing that hysterical symptoms represent the transformed, physically expressed residue of memories too emotionally intolerable to remain in ordinary conscious awareness.

The case of Anna O., treated by Breuer rather than Freud directly, describes a patient who herself named the treatment the talking cure, working through each individual symptom by tracing it back to its original precipitating memory and putting that memory into words under a kind of induced hypnotic concentration.

The leisure class arose when predatory exploit became more honourable than productive work, and its members prove their standing by conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, wasting time and goods in ways that visibly cost money.

Veblen applies the idea to dress, manners, sport, religion and higher learning, finding in each an institution shaped by the need to display wealth rather than by the use it claims to serve.

John Tanner, a rich revolutionary who has written a book on the Life Force, is made guardian of Ann Whitefield and flees to Spain when he realises she means to marry him; she pursues and catches him, inverting conventional courtship dynamics with genuine comic force.

The third act, often played on its own as Don Juan in Hell, is a long debate among Don Juan, Doña Ana, the Statue and the Devil about whether life is going anywhere and what the superman would be, giving philosophical concerns direct dramatic voice.

Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, bets Colonel Pickering that in six months he can pass off Eliza Doolittle, a Covent Garden flower girl, as a duchess by teaching her to speak, staging class as fundamentally performable through learned speech.

Higgins succeeds at an ambassador's party, then treats the triumph as his own and Eliza as a finished experiment, exposing how thoroughly intellectual accomplishment can blind its own author to the actual person that accomplishment was performed upon.