Motivational Quotes

Women

I think the worst woman that ever existed would have made a man of very passable reputation -- they are all better than us and their faults such as they are must originate with ourselves.

- Byron, Lord

Best Quotes about Women

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

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

Byron, Lord

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.

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

Byron, Lord

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

We have now traced the history of women from Paradise to the nineteenth century and have heard nothing through the long roll of the ages but the clank of their fetters.

Wilde, Lady Jane

These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.

Aristophanes

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

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

Stephens, James

10.

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

Millet, Kate

11.

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

12.

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

Korda, Michael

13.

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

14.

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

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.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

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

18.

Woman -- for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: Blind yourself, for I am blind.

Pirandello, Luigi

19.

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

Euripides

20.

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

Sills, Beverly

21.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

22.

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

23.

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

Carter, Angela

24.

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

25.

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

26.

I'm a woman who was raised to believe that you are not complete unless you have a man. Well, in some ways it's true. I am a feminist to a point. But I'm not going to denythe fact that I love to be with men.

Hawn, Goldie

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man's image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!

Kundera, Milan

32.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

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

34.

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

West, Rebecca

35.

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

Laing, Dilys

36.

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

37.

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

Fuller, Margaret

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Astell, Mary

41.

The individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.

Rankin, Jeannette

42.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

43.

The real thinking of woman is pre-eminently practical and applied. It is something we describe as sound common sense, and is usually directed to what is close at hand and personal. In general, it can be said that feminine mentality manifests an undeveloped, childlike, or primitive character; instead of the thirst for knowledge, curiosity; instead of judgment, prejudice; instead of thinking, imagination or dreaming; instead of will, wishing. Where a man takes up objective problems, a woman contents herself with solving riddles; where he battles for knowledge and understanding, she contents herself with faith or superstition, or else she makes assumptions.

Jung, Emma

44.

Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the clich? that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.

Lasch, Christopher

45.

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.

46.

Even the wisest men make fools of themselves about women, and even the most foolish women are wise about men.

Reik, Theodor

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.

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

49.

If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

50.

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

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G.