Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

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

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

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

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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

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

James, Henry

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifery.

Mandeville, Bernard

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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.

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.

Oates, Joyce Carol

13.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

14.

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

15.

Don't you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you'll never be a dominant force in the world? You'll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She's in there sitting down.

Delillo, Don

16.

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

Berger, John

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

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

22.

Women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment, and they are right, or it would rob them of their weapons.

Byron, Lord

23.

I buy women shoes and they use them to walk away from me.

Rooney, Mickey

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Steele, Sir Richard

30.

A women knows how to keep quiet when she is in the right, whereas a man, when he is in the right, will keep on talking.

Chazal, Malcolm De

31.

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

Millet, Kate

32.

A man's idea in a game of cards is war, cruel, devastating, and pitiless. A lady's idea of it is a combination of larceny, embezzlement and burglary.

Dunne, Finley Peter

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

Men don't know much about women. We do know when they're happy. We know when they're crying, and we know when they're pissed off. We just don't know in what order these are gonna come at us.

Davis, Evan

39.

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

40.

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

Reik, Theodor

41.

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

Mencken, H. L.

42.

Jong, Erica

43.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

44.

If women were humbler, men would be more honest.

Vanbrugh, Sir John

45.

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

46.

A women under stress is not immediately concerned with finding solutions to her problems but rather seeks relief by expressing herself and being understood.

Gray, John

47.

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

Astor, Lady Nancy

48.

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

49.

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

50.

There are always women who will take men on their own terms. If I were a man I wouldn't bother to change while there are women like that around.

Oakley, Ann