Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

To be completely woman you need a master, and in him a compass for your life. You need a man you can look up to and respect. If you dethrone him it's no wonder that you are discontented, and discontented women are not loved for long.

Dietrich, Marlene

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

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

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

Women are most fascinating between the ages of thirty-five and forty, after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass forty, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely.

Dior, Christian

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

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

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

10.

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

11.

Women still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last.

Gourmont, Remy De

12.

Man loves little and often. Woman much and rarely.

Basta

13.

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

Earhart, Amelia

14.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

15.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

16.

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.

Oates, Joyce Carol

17.

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

18.

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

Fuller, Margaret

19.

A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.

Greer, Germaine

20.

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

21.

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

22.

A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can't. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn't believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She's a male construct, and she's afraid women will deconstruct her. She's afraid of everything, because she can't change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she's my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

23.

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

24.

We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities -- courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning -- whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage.

Baudrillard, Jean

25.

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

Laing, Dilys

26.

Nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity, though I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses... it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

27.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart's the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

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

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.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

31.

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

Berger, John

32.

Once a man is on hand, a woman tends to stop believing in her own beliefs.

Dowling, Colette

33.

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

34.

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

35.

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

Earhart, Amelia

36.

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

37.

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

Friedan, Betty

38.

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

39.

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.

Paglia, Camille

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

Whether women are better than men I cannot say, but I can say they are certainly no worse.

Meir, Golda

43.

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

Sills, Beverly

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Men are just as sensitive, and in some ways more sensitive, than women are.

Angelis, Barbara De

49.

Give us that grand word woman once again, and let's have done with lady; one's a term full of fine force, strong, beautiful, and firm, fit for the noblest use of tongue or pen; and one's a word for lackeys.

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

50.

So it is naturally with the male and the female; the one is superior, the other inferior; the one governs, the other is governed; and the same rule must necessarily hold good with respect to all mankind.

Aristotle