Motivational Quotes

Women

Woman is not born: she is made. In the making, her humanity is destroyed. She becomes symbol of this, symbol of that: mother of the earth, slut of the universe; but she never becomes herself because it is forbidden for her to do so.

- Dworkin, Andrea

Best Quotes about Women

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.

A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.

Brookner, Anita

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

Friedan, Betty

The real thinking of woman is pre-eminently practical and applied. It is something we describe as sound common sense, and is usually directed to what is close at hand and personal. In general, it can be said that feminine mentality manifests an undeveloped, childlike, or primitive character; instead of the thirst for knowledge, curiosity; instead of judgment, prejudice; instead of thinking, imagination or dreaming; instead of will, wishing. Where a man takes up objective problems, a woman contents herself with solving riddles; where he battles for knowledge and understanding, she contents herself with faith or superstition, or else she makes assumptions.

Jung, Emma

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

Stephens, James

Dworkin, Andrea

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

Martineau, Harriet

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

Bagehot, Walter

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

10.

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

11.

Most women defend themselves. It is the female of the species -- it is the tigress and lioness in you -- which tends to defend when attacked.

Thatcher, Margaret

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

15.

The most important thing in a relationship between a man and a woman is that one of them must be good at taking orders.

Festa, Linda

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding.

Wycherley, William

19.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

Stark, Freya

20.

We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest -- blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says -- Work; and to us it says -- Seem! To you it says -- As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labor is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says -- Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labor. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.

Schreiner, Olive

21.

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

Janeway, Elizabeth

22.

The clich? that women, more consistently than men, turn inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility; possibility that society denies.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer

23.

If the wife sins, the husband is not innocent.

Proverb, Italian

24.

Were there no women, men might live like gods.

Dekker, Thomas

25.

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

26.

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

West, Mae

27.

You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.

Williams, Tennessee

28.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

29.

To behold her is an immediate check to loose behavior; to love her is a liberal education.

Steele, Sir Richard

30.

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

Thatcher, Margaret

31.

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

32.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

Wilde, Oscar

33.

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

Diderot, Denis

34.

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

Reik, Theodor

35.

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

36.

For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.

Victoria, Queen

37.

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.

38.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.

Lasch, Christopher

39.

A good cigar is as great a comfort to a man as a good cry is to a woman.

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

40.

A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.

Lynes, Russell

41.

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

Woolf, Virginia

42.

If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.

Porter, O. Henry

43.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Astor, Lady Nancy

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Mencken, H. L.

50.

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train.

Mcginley, Phyllis