The Two Sexes Quotes & Sayings

If there are more than two sexes, then so be it and, of course, the assumption that there are two helps shape, as many have argued, the binary logic that underpins much of the history of western philosophy. — Alison Assiter

Desire changes its character by 180 degrees. Often, when first aroused, it is felt as the desire to have. The desire to touch is, partly, the desire to lay hands on, to take. Later, transformed, the same desire becomes the desire to be taken, to lose oneself within the desired. From these two opposed moments come one of the dialectics of desire; both moments apply to both sexes and they oscillate. Clearly the second moment, the desire to lose oneself within, is the most abandoned, the most desperate, and it is the one that Caravaggio chose (or was compelled) to reveal in many of his paintings. — John Berger

I wish you to understand that there is one man, and only one, for each woman, and one woman only for each man. When those two meet they fly together and are one through all the endless chain of existence. Until they meet all unions are mere accidents which have no meaning. Sooner or later each couple becomes complete. It may not be here. It may be in the next sphere where the sexes meet as they do on earth. Or it may be further delayed. But every man and every woman has his or her affinity, and will find it. Of earthly marriages perhaps one in five is permanent. The others are accidental. Real marriage is of the soul and spirit. Sex actions are a mere external symbol which mean nothing and are foolish, or even pernicious, when the thing which they should symbolize is wanting. Am I clear? — Arthur Conan Doyle

In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same. — Alexis De Tocqueville

The relation between the white and black races in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes.
If the one of the two sexes were told that they did not play any greater part in the life of the other sex than this other sex plays within their own existence, they would be shocked and hurt.
[ ... ]
If they (white people) had been told that they played no more important part in the lives of the Natives than the Natives played in their own lives, they would have been highly indignant and ill at ease.
If you had told the Natives that they played no greater part in the life of the white people than the white people played in their lives, they would never have believed you, but would have laughed at you. Probably in Natives circles, stories are passing about, and being repeated, which prove the all-absorbing interest of the white people in the Kikuyu or Kavirondo, and their complete dependence upon them. — Karen Blixen

On the steps of the Federal Building we ran into Carmencita Ibanez, a classmate of ours and one of the nice things about being a member of a race with two sexes. — Robert A. Heinlein

Him & Her are born directly from the ideas behind the Panton Chair. An evolution of the hermaphroditic original, declined into the harmony of the two sexes. They assume sculpted forms like naked models of seduction ... but they feel no shame. — Fabio Novembre

The Phoenix riddle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it. So to one neutral thing both sexes fit, We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love. — John Donne

Marriage ... is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives. — Immanuel Kant

I regard the effort to introduce women into colleges for young men as very undesirable, and for many reasons. That the two sexes should be united, both as teachers and pupils, in the same institution seems very desirable, but rarely in early life by a method that removes them from parental watch and care, and the protecting influences of a home. — Catharine Beecher

The chaste severity of the fathers in whatever related to the commerce of the two sexes flowed from the same principle
their abhorrence of every enjoyment which might gratify the sensual and degrade the spiritual nature of man. It was their favourite opinion, that if Adam had preserved his obedience to the Creator, he would have lived for ever in a state of virgin purity, and that some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled paradise with a race of innocent and immortal beings. — Edward Gibbon

Good riddance. After all, it's not as if the jerk had done me any favors recently. Well, he'd washed my clothes and bought me two breakfasts (like a Hobbit). There was that. But he'd also dragged me into a Battle of the Sexes that should have been over and done with a good thirty years ago, all because he needed a warm body to fill a slot. — Diana Peterfreund

As long as there are two nations, two parties, two sexes or even two people there are going to be divisions. And all the talk in the world isn't going to change that. Thank goodness! — Lyn Nofziger

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes. — David Markson

Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. — Simone De Beauvoir

Anyhow, with their extraordinary gift for, and experience in, affairs of the heart from the double point of view, both of the man and of the woman it is not difficult to see that these people have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other. — Edward Carpenter

We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth. — Sigmund Freud

Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes. — Gilles Deleuze

The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. Their opposition took shape within an original Mitsein, and she has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unit with the two halves riveted to each other: terristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other. — Simone De Beauvoir

...Everything that's not asexual has two sexes, male and female. Most of the time it takes one of each to reproduce. Then there's the whiptail lizard. This is a lizard that lives way the fuck out there in the middle of the desert, and sometimes it's hard to find another lizard to mate with out there. Therefore, what the female whiptail can do is sort of make her eggs start dividing on their own. She makes daughters, clones of herself. It's called parthenogenesis. — Erin O'Riordan

That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes
the legal subordination of one sex to the other
is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other. — John Stuart Mill

Most Elizabethan men will shake their heads in disbelief if you suggest the idea of the equality of the sexes. No two men are born equal - some are born rich, some poor; the elder of two brothers will succeed to his father's estates, not the younger - so why should men and women be treated equally? — Ian Mortimer

The sexes were made for each other, and only in the wise and loving union of the two is the fullness of health and duty and happiness to be expected. — William Hall

Father, mother, child, which express both the union of the sexes and de production of the being, can only be considered dependently on one another, and relatively to one another. A woman could exist without the existence of a man; but there is no mother if there is no father, nor a child without both of them. Each one of these ways of being presumes and recalls the other two; that is to say, they are relative. Considered thus, they are called relationships, in Latin, ratio; father, mother, child are persons, and their union forms the family. The union of the sexes, which is the foundation of all these relationships, is called marriage. — Louis De Bonald

while many moral systems have set restraints on sex almost as severe as any Eugenist could set, they have almost always had the character of securing the fidelity of the two sexes to each other, and leaving the rest to God. — G.K. Chesterton

True emancipation ... will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds. — Emma Goldman

If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkenness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says the Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings. — G.K. Chesterton

Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam. — Thomas Hardy

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one. — Simone De Beauvoir

I think competitiveness between two people is still relevant, and the battle of the sexes still intrigues. — Julian Ovenden

The world looks for happiness through self-assertion. The Christian knows that joy is found in self-abandonment. 'If a man will let himself be lost for My sake,' Jesus said, 'he will find his true self.' A Christian woman's true freedom lies on the other side of a very small gate
humble obedience
but that gate leads out into a largeness of life undreamed of by the liberators of the world, to a place where the God-given differentiation between the sexes is not obfuscated but celebrated, where our inequalities are seen as essential to the image of God, for it is in male and female, in male as male and female as female, not as two identical and interchangeable halves, that the image is manifested. — Elisabeth Elliot

The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other. — Mary Wollstonecraft

I've always felt there are three sexes: men, women, and actors. And actors combine the worst qualities of the other two. — Peter Biskind

1: There are at least six of them: Sight, which embraces space itself, and tells us by means of light of the existence of the objects which surround us, and of their colors. Hearing, which absorbs through the air the vibrations caused by agreeably resonant or merely noisy bodies. Smell, by means of which we savor all odorous things. Taste, by which we appreciate whatever is palatable or only edible. Touch, by which we are made aware of the surfaces and the textures of objects. Finally physical desire, which draws the two sexes together so that they may procreate. — Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Haven't you realized that pleasure, which is indeed certainly the one and only reason for the two sexes to come together, is nevertheless not enough to establish a relationship between them? And that though this pleasure is preceded by desire which draws people together, it is however followed by aversion which pushes them apart? It's a law of nature which only love can change. Can we feel love whenever we want? Yet love is always needed, which would be a dreadfully tiresome thing if it hadn't fortunately been realized that it's enough for just one of the partners to feel it, thereby halving the problem, and without even incurring any great loss; in fact, one party is happy to love, the other to please, which is actually a bit less exciting but which can be combined with the pleasure of deceiving and that evens things out, so everyone's happy. — Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

The woman wants the man to love her for ever and ever. She deliberately shuts her eyes to those two terrible enemies - Time and Change. Men are more realistic. They know that all things pass. And yet, it's precisely out of this tension between the two sexes that civilization has evolved. Had this not been present, man would have become extinct like the many animals who were overtaken by this fate. Why do I say this? Because I see this "push" and "pull" as masculine and feminine principles, respectively, both of which are essential for the survival of the human race. — Khushwant Singh

The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The first symptom of true love in a man is timidity, in a young woman, boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming each the other's qualities. — Victor Hugo

The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature. — Margaret Mead

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? — Virginia Woolf

These three ties, therefore, set three problems: how to find an. occupation which will enable us to survive under the limitations set by the nature of the earth; how to find a position among our fellows, so that we may cooperate and share the benefits of cooperation; how to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in two sexes and that the continuance and furtherance of mankind depends upon our love-life. Individual — Alfred Adler

The great mistake in dealing with this opposition is to search for a proper measure between two extremes. What one should do instead is to bring out what both extremes share: the fantasy of a peaceful world where the agonistic tension of sexual difference disappears, either in a clear and stable hierarchic distinction of sexes or in the happy fluidity of a desexualized universe. And it is not difficult to discern in this fantasy of a peaceful world the fantasy of a society without social antagonisms, in short, without class struggle. — Slavoj Zizek

The terms masculine and feminine are
used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal
papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite
like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the
positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of
man to designate human beings in general ; whereas woman
represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without
reciprocity. — Simone De Beauvoir

The real thing that keeps men and women apart, is fear. Women blame men and men blame women, but the culprit is fear, women are afraid of one thing, men are afraid of a different thing; the fears of women have to do with losing while the fears of men have to do with not being good enough for something. One is loss, the other is insecurity. Men are innately more insecure than women and women are innately more needful of companionship than men. It's good for both men and women to be able to recognize and identify these fears not only within themselves, but within each other, and then men and women will see that they really do need to help each other. It's not a game, it's not a competition, the two sexes need one another. — C. JoyBell C.

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than the woman. Whether deep thought, reason, or imagination or merely the use of the senses and hands ... We may also infer ... The average mental power in man must be above that of woman. — Charles Darwin

No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes; yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two? — Ronald Fisher

The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary - culturally and biologically - for the optimal development of a human being."12 In a summary of the relevant science, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox finds much the same: Let me now conclude our review of the social scientific literature on sex and parenting by spelling out what should be obvious to all. The best psychological, sociological, and biological research to date now suggests that - on average - men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.13 — Sherif Girgis

Human kind is made up of two sexes, women and men. Is it possible that a mass is improved by the improvement of only one part and the other part is ignored? Is it possible that if half of a mass is tied to earth with chains and the other half can soar into skies? — Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you? — James Thurber

Throughout the island they wear the same sort of clothes, without any other distinction except what is necessary to distinguish the two sexes and the married and unmarried. — Thomas More

Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused for having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was normality, all afloat here on sodden pools of depravity calculated only to manifest the pricelessness of what they were throwing away, the three sexes in two colors, a group of people all mentally and physically the wrong size. — William Gaddis

Thus, that happiness the two sexes cannot find with the other they will find, one in blind obedience, the other in the most energetic expression of his domination. — Marquis De Sade

Dance, v.i. To leap about to the sound of tittering music, preferably with arms about your neighbor's wife or daughter. There are many kinds of dances, but all those requiring the participation of the two sexes have two characteristics in common: they are conspicuously innocent, and warmly loved by the vicious. — Ambrose Bierce

The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea. — Yann Martel

There are the two of you - the two sexes- to love and help one another. It must be a rich and wonderful world — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

It's a great shame that the world was organized with two sexes. It makes for a lot of trouble. — Margaret Ayer Barnes