Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

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

To be born woman is to know -- although they do not speak of it at school -- women must labor to be beautiful.

Yeats, William Butler

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.

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

Women lie about their age; men lie about their income.

Feather, William

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

Gourmont, Remy De

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

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless -- for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.

Irving, Washington

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

Porter, O. Henry

10.

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

11.

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

12.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder -- in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

Angelou, Maya

13.

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

Maciver, Robert M.

14.

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

Paglia, Camille

15.

I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.

Eliot, George

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

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

20.

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

21.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

Women are most fascinating between the ages of thirty-five and forty, after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass forty, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely.

Dior, Christian

25.

Love is lost in men's capricious minds, but in women s, it fills all the room it finds.

Crowne, John

26.

Men naturally resent it when women take greater liberties in dress than men are allowed.

Korda, Michael

27.

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

Sills, Beverly

28.

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.

Archard, Marcel

29.

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

Wycherley, William

30.

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

31.

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

Antrim, Minna

32.

Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can't be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half of the time.

Rowland, Helen

33.

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

Gray, John

34.

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

Earhart, Amelia

35.

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

36.

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

Stephens, James

37.

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

Lawrence, D. H.

38.

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

39.

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

40.

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

Steele, Sir Richard

41.

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

Millet, Kate

42.

We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities -- courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning -- whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage.

Baudrillard, Jean

43.

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

James, Henry

44.

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

45.

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

46.

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.

Aristophanes

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

50.

The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.

Fuller, Margaret