Love, Sex and Gender

Hold tenderly that which you cherish, for it is precious and a tight grip may crush it. Do not let fear of dropping it cause you to hold it too tightly: the chances are, it's holding you, too.
-- Bob Alberti

Sex is dirty only when it's done right.
-- Woody Allen

I married beneath me. All women do.
-- Lady Nancy Astor (1879-1964) -- English politician, first woman member of the British Parliment

In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance, he laid the blame on a woman.
-- Nancy Astor

We are not asking for superiority for we have always had that; all we ask is equality.
-- Nancy Astor

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
-- Samuel Butler

Man's love is of man's life a part; it is a woman's whole existence.
-- Lord Byron

In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.
-- Lord Byron

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love -- first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
--Albert Camus

My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.
--Winston Churchill

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl -- no superior alternative has yet been found.
--Winston Churchill

( a conversation between Winston Churchill and Lady Astor )
Lady Astor-- Why Sir Churchill you are drunk!
Churchill-- And you are ugly, but I shall be sober in the morning!
--Winston Churchill/Lady Nancy Astor

Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

Beauty awakens the soul to act.
--Dante

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
-- Albert Einstein

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
-- Albert Einstein

On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
[It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.]
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (1943)

To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends.
--Benjamin Franklin

If Jack's in love, he's no judge of Jill's beauty.
--Benjamin Franklin

Where there is love there is life.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned: do not have sex with the authorities.
-- Matt Groening

Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
-- Heinlein/Lazarus Long

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.
-- Henry Kissinger

If you want something very, very badly, let it go free. If it comes back to you, it's yours forever. If it doesn't, it was never yours to begin with.
-- Jesse Lair

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
-- George Levinger

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.
-- Groucho Marx

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
-- Henry Louis Mencken

Bachelors have consciences, married men have wives.
-- H. L. Mencken.

Bachelors know more about women than married men do. If they didn't, they'd be married too.
-- H. L. Mencken.

I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.
-- Montaigne

The heart has it's reasons that reason does not know.
-- Blaise Pascal

People would never fall in love if they had not heard love talked about.
-- François La Rochefoucauld

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
-- Jean Jacques Rousseau

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
-- Bertrand Russell

I did not know I loved you until I heard myself telling so, for one instance I thought, Good God, what have I said? and then I knew it was true.
-- Bertrand Russell

By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
-- Socrates

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.
-- Anna Louise Strong

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
-- Alfred Tennyson

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
-- Mother Teresa

It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.
-- William Makepeace Thackeray

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.
-- Voltaire

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.
-- Voltaire

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
-- Peter De Vries

Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
-- Oscar Wilde

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
-- Oscar Wilde

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
-- Oscar Wilde

The only way a woman can ever reform her husband is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
-- Oscar Wilde

Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
-- Oscar Wilde

Sexiness wears thin after a while, and beauty fades, but to be married to someone who makes you laugh every day, that's a real treat!
-- Joanne Woodward

Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. Yes is the answer.
-- Swami X

Was she so loved because her eyes were so beautiful or were her eyes so beautiful because she was so loved?
-- Anzia Yezierska