Motivational Quotes

Women

The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

- Gillman, Charlotte P.

Best Quotes about Women

The nearer society approaches to divine order, the less separation will there be in the characters, duties, and pursuits of men and women. Women will not become less gentle and graceful, but men will become more so. Women will not neglect the care and education of their children, but men will find themselves ennobled and refined by sharing those duties with them; and will receive, in return, co-operation and sympathy in the discharge of various other duties, now deemed inappropriate to women. The more women become rational companions, partners in business and in thought, as well as in affection and amusement, the more highly will men appreciate home.

Child, Lydia M.

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Friedan, Betty

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

Brookner, Anita

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! . It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

Oliphant, Margaret

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Woolf, Virginia

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

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

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Woolf, Virginia

11.

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

12.

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

Berger, John

13.

A typical minority group stereotype -- woman as nigger -- if she knows her place (home), she is really a quite lovable, loving creature, happy and childlike.

Weisstein, Naomi

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Antrim, Minna

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Woolf, Virginia

20.

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

Gray, John

21.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

22.

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

23.

What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.

Byron, Lord

24.

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

Curtis, George William

25.

Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don't are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn't put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a lesbian.

Lebowitz, Fran

26.

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

Korda, Michael

27.

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.

28.

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

Carter, Angela

29.

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

Duras, Marguerite

30.

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

31.

A woman is like a teabag -- only in hot water do you realize how strong she is.

Reagan, Nancy

32.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.

33.

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

Millet, Kate

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Bird, Caroline

41.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Porter, O. Henry

48.

When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man?

Evans, Dame Edith

49.

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

50.

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