Motivational Quotes

Women

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

- Thatcher, Margaret

Best Quotes about Women

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The mouth of a cannon is safer that the mouth of a woman scorned.

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

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

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover -- but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

Byron, Lord

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

Byron, Lord

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

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

10.

To be successful, a woman has to be better at her job than a man.

Meir, Golda

11.

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

12.

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

Stephens, James

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Diderot, Denis

16.

Women are natural guerrillas. Scheming, we nestle into the enemy's bed, avoiding open warfare, watching the options, playing the odds.

Kempton, Sally

17.

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

18.

Aren't women prudes if they don't and prostitutes if they do?

Millet, Kate

19.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

20.

Men never remember, but women never forget.

21.

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

22.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

Sand, George

26.

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

Porter, O. Henry

27.

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

Astor, Lady Nancy

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Man forgives women anything save the wit to outwit him.

Antrim, Minna

32.

Men are motivated and empowered when they feel needed. Women are motivated and empowered when they feel cherished.

Gray, John

33.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Johnson, Samuel

34.

The main difference between men and woman is that men are lunatics and woman are idiots.

West, Rebecca

35.

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

Archard, Marcel

36.

If the wife sins, the husband is not innocent.

Proverb, Italian

37.

Woman is the Nigger of the World.

Lennon, John

38.

All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.

Deutsch, Helene

39.

Man, born of woman, has found it a hard thing to forgive her for giving him birth. The patriarchal protest against the ancient matriarch has borne strange fruit through the years.

Smith, Lillian

40.

A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry,A woman's function plainly is... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

41.

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

42.

The trouble with some women is they get all excited about nothing, and then they marry him.

Cher

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.

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

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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

46.

Femininity appears to be one of those pivotal qualities that is so important no one can define it.

Bird, Caroline

47.

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

48.

Were there no women, men might live like gods.

Dekker, Thomas

49.

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

Berger, John

50.

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