Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

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.

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

Duras, Marguerite

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

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

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

10.

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

Paglia, Camille

11.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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.

Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding.

Wycherley, William

14.

When men and women are able to respect and accept their differences then love has a chance to blossom.

Gray, John

15.

A woman should say: Have I made him happy? Is he satisfied? Does he love me more than he loved me before? Is he likely to go to bed with another woman? If he does, then it's the wife's fault because she is not trying to make him happy.

Cartland, Barbara

16.

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

17.

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

Stephens, James

18.

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

19.

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

Millet, Kate

20.

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness -- her selfishness, in short -- is a reproach to the American way of life.

Jong, Erica

21.

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

22.

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

23.

It is the woman who chooses the man who will choose her.

Geraldy, Paul

24.

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.

25.

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

Bagehot, Walter

26.

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

Jong, Erica

27.

To behold her is an immediate check to loose behavior; to love her is a liberal education.

Steele, Sir Richard

28.

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

29.

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

Wilde, Oscar

30.

Man forgives women anything save the wit to outwit him.

Antrim, Minna

31.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

32.

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

33.

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

34.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life -- some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed -- because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

Eliot, George

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Brookner, Anita

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Euripides

41.

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

Byron, Lord

42.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

43.

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.

Archard, Marcel

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Reagan, Nancy

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

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