Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings -- woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

Baudelaire, Charles

Women make love for love, men make love for lust.

Harge, Derrick

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

Eve is a twofold mystery.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

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

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

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Carter, Angela

Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.

Brookner, Anita

10.

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

Millet, Kate

11.

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

12.

If women were humbler, men would be more honest.

Vanbrugh, Sir John

13.

The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly... men don't like it.

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

Friedan, Betty

15.

Women serve but to keep a man from better company.

Wycherley, William

16.

Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others.

Earhart, Amelia

17.

Men are gentle, honest and straightforward. Women are convoluted, deceptive and dangerous.

Pizzey, Erin

18.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

19.

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

20.

They talk about a woman's sphere, as though it had a limit. There's not a place in earth or heaven. There's not a task to mankind given... without a woman in it.

Field, Kate

21.

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

22.

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

Porter, O. Henry

23.

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

Steele, Sir Richard

24.

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

25.

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

Greer, Germaine

26.

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

27.

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

Jong, Erica

28.

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

29.

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

West, Rebecca

30.

I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond and a sapphire bracelet lasts forever.

Loos, Anita

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, a herb most bruised is woman.

Euripides

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Rooney, Mickey

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Diderot, Denis

41.

Observe this, that tho a woman swear, forswear, lie, dissemble, back-bite, be proud, vain, malicious, anything, if she secures the main chance, she's still virtuous; that's a maxim.

Farquhar, George

42.

Woman's destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her.

Sade, Marquis De

43.

Women receive he insults of men with tolerance, having been bitten in the nipple by their toothless gums.

Laing, Dilys

44.

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

45.

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

Hoagland, Edward

46.

I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters.

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

47.

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

48.

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

Byron, Lord

49.

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

50.

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