Motivational Quotes

Women

She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn't a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a sneaky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.

- Atwood, Margaret

Best Quotes about Women

The common foible of women who have been handsome is to forget that they are no longer so.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

When a woman is very, very bad, she is awful, but when a man is correspondingly good, he is weird.

Antrim, Minna

Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.

Baudrillard, Jean

Men should be saying I want to become a woman. The world would be a far better place if more men wanted to become women, than women wanted to become men.

Halsey, Albert

Man loves little and often. Woman much and rarely.

Basta

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.

Austen, Jane

I'm a woman who was raised to believe that you are not complete unless you have a man. Well, in some ways it's true. I am a feminist to a point. But I'm not going to denythe fact that I love to be with men.

Hawn, Goldie

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

Greer, Germaine

10.

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

12.

I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters.

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

13.

Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow -- or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends.

14.

The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly... men don't like it.

Wilde, Oscar

15.

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.

Russell, Bertrand

16.

But if God had wanted us to think just with our wombs, why did He give us a brain?

Luce, Clare Boothe

17.

Give us that grand word woman once again, and let's have done with lady; one's a term full of fine force, strong, beautiful, and firm, fit for the noblest use of tongue or pen; and one's a word for lackeys.

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

18.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Wilde, Oscar

19.

If women were humbler, men would be more honest.

Vanbrugh, Sir John

20.

The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune.

Earhart, Amelia

21.

I'm anal retentive. I'm a workaholic. I have insomnia. And I'm a control freak. That's why I'm not married. Who could stand me?

Madonna

22.

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness -- her selfishness, in short -- is a reproach to the American way of life.

Jong, Erica

23.

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

24.

Women have no wilderness in them. They are provident instead content in the tight hot cell of their hearts. To eat dusty bread.

Bogan, Louise

25.

It is not women's fault if we are so tender. It is in the nature of the lives we live. And further, it would be a terrible catastrophe if men had to live men's lives and women's also. Which is precisely what has happened today -- to women.

James, Selma

26.

Observe this, that tho a woman swear, forswear, lie, dissemble, back-bite, be proud, vain, malicious, anything, if she secures the main chance, she's still virtuous; that's a maxim.

Farquhar, George

27.

Women serve but to keep a man from better company.

Wycherley, William

28.

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

Millet, Kate

29.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

30.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.

Welles, Orson

31.

If all men are born free, why is it that all women are born slaves?

Astell, Mary

32.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life -- some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed -- because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

Eliot, George

33.

Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don't are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn't put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a lesbian.

Lebowitz, Fran

34.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Woolf, Virginia

35.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.

Austen, Jane

36.

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.

Weininger, Otto

37.

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover -- but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

Byron, Lord

38.

The mouth of a cannon is safer that the mouth of a woman scorned.

39.

Woman -- for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: Blind yourself, for I am blind.

Pirandello, Luigi

40.

The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.

Brookner, Anita

42.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is What does a woman want?

Freud, Sigmund

43.

If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

44.

Men mourn for what they have lost; women for what they ain't got.

Billings, Josh

45.

Women are natural guerrillas. Scheming, we nestle into the enemy's bed, avoiding open warfare, watching the options, playing the odds.

Kempton, Sally

46.

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Berger, John

47.

It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.

Brookner, Anita

48.

A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can't. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn't believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She's a male construct, and she's afraid women will deconstruct her. She's afraid of everything, because she can't change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she's my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

49.

To be successful, a woman has to be better at her job than a man.

Meir, Golda

50.

Woman! The peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch, and the sinner his justification!

Rowland, Helen