Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

If women were humbler, men would be more honest.

Vanbrugh, Sir John

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through man's passions, nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold Von

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

Diderot, Denis

A woman who looks like a girl and thinks like a man is the best sort, the most enjoyable to be and the most pleasurable to have and to hold.

Burchill, Julie

There is very little difference between men and women in space.

Sharman, Helen

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

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Murdoch, Iris

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

Curtis, George William

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

10.

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

11.

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

Jong, Erica

12.

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

Antrim, Minna

13.

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

14.

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

15.

It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.

Duras, Marguerite

16.

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

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.

Women serve but to keep a man from better company.

Wycherley, William

19.

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

20.

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

Sills, Beverly

21.

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

Fuller, Margaret

22.

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

23.

I don't know why women want any of the things men have when one the things that women have is men.

Chanel, Coco

24.

Women are considered deep -- why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

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

26.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Woolf, Virginia

27.

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

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

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.

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

32.

Man loves little and often. Woman much and rarely.

Basta

33.

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

Byron, Lord

34.

Man forgives women anything save the wit to outwit him.

Antrim, Minna

35.

The angel of the Family is Woman. Mother, wife, or sister, Woman is the caress of life, the soothing sweetness of affection shed over its toils, a reflection for the individual of the loving providence which watches over Humanity. In her there is treasure enough of consoling tenderness to allay every pain. Moreover for every one of us she is the initiator of the future. The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of reaching towards it step by step; create the future, in short, of which the living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. Through her the Family, with its divine mystery of reproduction, points to Eternity.

Mazzini, Giuseppe

36.

Eve is a twofold mystery.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

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.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

I'm anal retentive. I'm a workaholic. I have insomnia. And I'm a control freak. That's why I'm not married. Who could stand me?

Madonna

47.

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

48.

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

Kempton, Sally