Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antrim, Minna

Eve is a twofold mystery.

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

10.

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

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

12.

To me the female principle is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

13.

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

Jong, Erica

14.

I have always found women difficult. I don't really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth.

Cartland, Barbara

15.

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

16.

Coming to terms with the rhythms of women's lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.

Mead, Margaret

17.

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

18.

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

Porter, O. Henry

19.

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

20.

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

21.

It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son -- and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

Rowland, Helen

22.

I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.

Dinesen, Isak

23.

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

Reagan, Nancy

24.

If all men are born free, why is it that all women are born slaves?

Astell, Mary

25.

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

26.

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone.

Hoban, Russell

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Earhart, Amelia

31.

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

32.

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

Wilde, Oscar

33.

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

34.

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

James, Henry

35.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

37.

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

38.

Guys are simple... women are not simple and they always assume that men must be just as complicated as they are, only way more mysterious. The whole point is guys are not thinking much. They are just what they appear to be. Tragically.

Barry, Dave

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

43.

The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune.

Earhart, Amelia

44.

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

Fuller, Margaret

45.

When you educate a man you educate an individual; when you educate a woman you educate a whole family.

Maciver, Robert M.

46.

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

Woolf, Virginia

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

50.

It is well within the order of things that man should listen when his mate sings; but the true male never yet walked who liked to listen when his mate talked.

Wickham, Anna