Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

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

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

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

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

Twain, Mark

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.

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

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

Franklin, Benjamin

What Women Want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What Men Want: Tickets for the world series.

Barry, Dave

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

10.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

Girls we love for what they are; men for what they promise to be.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

13.

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

Sade, Marquis De

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

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

16.

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

Sand, George

17.

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

18.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.

Welles, Orson

19.

The angel of the Family is Woman. Mother, wife, or sister, Woman is the caress of life, the soothing sweetness of affection shed over its toils, a reflection for the individual of the loving providence which watches over Humanity. In her there is treasure enough of consoling tenderness to allay every pain. Moreover for every one of us she is the initiator of the future. The mother's first kiss teaches the child love; the first holy kiss of the woman he loves teaches man hope and faith in life; and love and faith create a desire for perfection and the power of reaching towards it step by step; create the future, in short, of which the living symbol is the child, link between us and the generations to come. Through her the Family, with its divine mystery of reproduction, points to Eternity.

Mazzini, Giuseppe

20.

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

Reik, Theodor

21.

You've got many refinements. I don't think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.

Williams, Tennessee

22.

A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.

Chesterfield, Lord

23.

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

24.

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

Duras, Marguerite

25.

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

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Man loves little and often. Woman much and rarely.

Basta

30.

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

31.

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

32.

We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest -- blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says -- Work; and to us it says -- Seem! To you it says -- As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labor is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says -- Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labor. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.

Schreiner, Olive

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.

Victoria, Queen

37.

Men mourn for what they have lost; women for what they ain't got.

Billings, Josh

38.

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

Antrim, Minna

39.

The common foible of women who have been handsome is to forget that they are no longer so.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.

Nin, Anais

43.

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

Friedan, Betty

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The trouble with some women is they get all excited about nothing, and then they marry him.

Cher

49.

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

50.

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

Earhart, Amelia