The man who feels no impulse toward the study of women may, as far as I am concerned, be what he will; one thing he certainly is not, he is no aesthetician.

-- Either/Or

When God created Eve, He let a deep sleep fall over Adam; for woman is the dream of man.

-- Either/Or

[Woman] awakens first at the touch of love; before that time she is a dream.

-- Either/Or

Under what category must she (woman) be conceived? Under being for another. . . . Woman shares this category with nature and, in general , with everything feminine.

-- Either/Or

Woman is . . . substance; man is reflection.

-- Either/Or

Woman . . . is a flower, as the poets like to say, and even the spiritual in her is present in a vegetative manner. She is wholly subject to nature, and hence only aesthetically free. In a deeper sense she first becomes free by her relation to man, and when man courts her properly, there can be no question of a choice.

-- Either/Or

To be a woman is something so strange, so mixed, so complex, that no predicate expresses it, and the many predicates one might use contradict one another so sharply that only a woman can endure it, and, still worse, can enjoy it.

-- Stages on Life’s Way

For my part, if I were a woman, I had rather be a woman in the orient where I would be a slave, for to be a slave, neither more nor less, is at any rate something definite, in comparison with being . . . nothing whatever.

-- Stages on Life’s Way

Gallantry is essentially woman’s due, and the fact that she accepts it instinctively may be explained as an instance of nature’s tender care for the weak, for those who have had a hard deal, to whom an illusion gives more than adequate compensation.

-- Stages on Life’s Way

Woman’s significance is wholly negative, as compared with that her positive significance is nil, indeed it is even pernicious. This is the truth which existence has hidden from her, while it consoles her with a vain conceit which surpasses everything that can enter into any man’s brain and with fatherly care has so arranged it all that language unites with everything else to confirm her in the conceit. -- Stages on Life’s Way

Woman is and ever will be the ruin of a man, as soon as he contracts a permanent relation with her.

-- Either/Or

A woman’s love is nothing but dissimulation and weakness.

-- Either/Or

A man can never be so cruel as a woman. Consult mythologies, fables, folktakes, and you will find this view confirmed. If a natural principle is to be described, whose mercilessness knows no limits, it will always be a feminine nature.

-- Either/Or

One had better be prompt . . . to regard woman as a jest. The entertainment is peerless.

-- Stages on Life’s Way

The more gifted a woman is, the more amusing.

-- Stages on Life’s Way