Motivational Quotes

Women

Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man -- it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.

- Diderot, Denis

Best Quotes about Women

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.

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

Curtis, George William

Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men.

Reik, Theodor

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

James, Henry

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

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

Women serve but to keep a man from better company.

Wycherley, William

10.

Man forgives women anything save the wit to outwit him.

Antrim, Minna

11.

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

12.

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.

Nin, Anais

13.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even out virtues.

Balzac, Honore De

14.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

Rich, Adrienne

15.

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

16.

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

Wilde, Oscar

17.

Once a man is on hand, a woman tends to stop believing in her own beliefs.

Dowling, Colette

18.

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

Astell, Mary

19.

Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others.

Earhart, Amelia

20.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

Hepburn, Katharine

21.

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

22.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

25.

It is well within the order of things that man should listen when his mate sings; but the true male never yet walked who liked to listen when his mate talked.

Wickham, Anna

26.

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

Steinem, Gloria

27.

He is half of a blessed man. Left to be finished by such as she; and she a fair divided excellence, whose fullness of perfection lies in him.

Shakespeare, William

28.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

29.

When men and women are able to respect and accept their differences then love has a chance to blossom.

Gray, John

30.

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

31.

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

Paglia, Camille

32.

Just as women are afraid of receiving, men are afraid of giving.

Gray, John

33.

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone.

Hoban, Russell

34.

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.

Thoreau, Henry David

35.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse -- as a luxury befitting a young man.

Stendhal, Henri B.

36.

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

37.

The cocks may crow, but it's the hen that lays the egg.

Thatcher, Margaret

38.

A woman who takes things from a man is called a girlfriend, a man who takes things from a woman is called a gigolo.

Stein, Ruthie

39.

The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

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

41.

The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

45.

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

Berger, John

46.

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.

Lawrence, D. H.

47.

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

Twain, Mark

48.

Men and women, women and men; it will never work.

Jong, Erica

49.

The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because then he becomes one of the children.

Duras, Marguerite

50.

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

Astor, Lady Nancy