Love & Passion Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Holmes slips a velvet glove over a sharp knuckle: the line flatters women while pinning them to a set of supposedly eternal instincts. “Never forgets her sex” sounds, on its face, like praise for self-possession. In practice it turns “sex” into destiny, a permanent lens through which every thought is filtered. The second sentence then tightens the trap with a sly, almost comic contrast: man versus angel. The angel is purity, moral uplift, the Victorian ideal of goodness without appetite. The man is flawed, worldly, charged with the very frictions polite society pretends not to notice. Holmes implies that women, despite the era’s saintly pedestal, prefer the human and erotic to the ethereal.

That’s the subtext doing double work. It winks at male readers: women are “really” interested in men, not virtue; don’t be intimidated by their piety. It also disciplines female readers: your attention naturally belongs to men, so any aspiration toward the “angelic” is either performance or self-deception. Even the phrasing “any day” has the rhythm of a club-room certainty, the kind of sociable absolutism that passes as insight because it’s delivered with confidence and charm.

Context matters: Holmes wrote in a 19th-century culture busy sorting women into archetypes (angel, mother, temptress) while limiting their actual agency. The quote’s wit is its camouflage; it packages gender essentialism as amused observation, making the bias feel like common sense rather than an argument.