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

Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.

Gourmont, Remy De

When you educate a man you educate an individual; when you educate a woman you educate a whole family.

Maciver, Robert M.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

The individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.

Rankin, Jeannette

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

Jong, Erica

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

Franklin, Benjamin

We have now traced the history of women from Paradise to the nineteenth century and have heard nothing through the long roll of the ages but the clank of their fetters.

Wilde, Lady Jane

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

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! . It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

Oliphant, Margaret

10.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Woolf, Virginia

11.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later, for another thing, they die earlier.

Mencken, H. L.

12.

So it is naturally with the male and the female; the one is superior, the other inferior; the one governs, the other is governed; and the same rule must necessarily hold good with respect to all mankind.

Aristotle

13.

Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, a herb most bruised is woman.

Euripides

14.

Man made one grave mistake: in answer to vaguely reformist and humanitarian agitation he admitted women to politics and the professions. The conservatives who saw this as the undermining of our civilization and the end of the state and marriage were right after all; it is time for the demolition to begin.

Greer, Germaine

15.

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

16.

Girls we love for what they are; men for what they promise to be.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

18.

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

Brookner, Anita

19.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Durrell, Lawrence

21.

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

22.

Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!

Kundera, Milan

23.

Women are as old as they feel and men are old when they lose their feelings.

West, Mae

24.

They talk about a woman's sphere, as though it had a limit. There's not a place in earth or heaven. There's not a task to mankind given... without a woman in it.

Field, Kate

25.

Men are just as sensitive, and in some ways more sensitive, than women are.

Angelis, Barbara De

26.

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

27.

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.

Mencken, H. L.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.

Chesterfield, Lord

31.

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

Paglia, Camille

32.

A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.

Greer, Germaine

33.

It seems as though women keep growing. Eventually they can have little or nothing in common with the men they chose long ago.

Clark, Eugenie

34.

Perhaps women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

Greer, Germaine

35.

The angel of the Family is Woman. Mother, wife, or sister, Woman is the caress of life, the soothing sweetness of affection shed over its toils, a reflection for the individual of the loving providence which watches over Humanity. In her there is treasure enough of consoling tenderness to allay every pain. Moreover for every one of us she is the initiator of the future. The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of reaching towards it step by step; create the future, in short, of which the living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. Through her the Family, with its divine mystery of reproduction, points to Eternity.

Mazzini, Giuseppe

36.

To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

37.

What Women Want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What Men Want: Tickets for the world series.

Barry, Dave

38.

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

Man forgives women anything save the wit to outwit him.

Antrim, Minna

40.

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

41.

Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.

Astor, Lady Nancy

42.

Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?

Woolf, Virginia

43.

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

44.

There is a growing strength in women, but it's in the forehead, not in the forearm.

Sills, Beverly

45.

The man of the house can destroy the pleasure of the household, but he cannot make it. That rests with the woman, and it is her greatest privilege.

Helps, Sir Arthur

46.

Guys are simple... women are not simple and they always assume that men must be just as complicated as they are, only way more mysterious. The whole point is guys are not thinking much. They are just what they appear to be. Tragically.

Barry, Dave

47.

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

Curtis, George William

48.

A woman is a branchy tree and man a singing wind; and from her branches carelessly he takes what he can find.

Stephens, James

49.

To be completely woman you need a master, and in him a compass for your life. You need a man you can look up to and respect. If you dethrone him it's no wonder that you are discontented, and discontented women are not loved for long.

Dietrich, Marlene

50.

Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.

Solanis, Valerie