Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

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

Because of our social circumstances, male and female are really two cultures and their life experiences are utterly different.

Millet, Kate

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Woolf, Virginia

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

A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.

Brookner, Anita

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

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

West, Rebecca

While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.

Boccaccio, Giovanni

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

10.

Women lie about their age; men lie about their income.

Feather, William

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Paglia, Camille

14.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

15.

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

16.

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

Diderot, Denis

17.

Love is lost in men's capricious minds, but in women s, it fills all the room it finds.

Crowne, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Duras, Marguerite

21.

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

Euripides

22.

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

23.

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

Maciver, Robert M.

24.

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

25.

Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow -- or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends.

26.

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

27.

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

Byron, Lord

28.

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

29.

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

Earhart, Amelia

30.

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

31.

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

Friedan, Betty

32.

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

33.

For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience.

Russell, Bertrand

34.

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

Cher

35.

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

36.

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

Greer, Germaine

37.

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

38.

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

Reik, Theodor

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

42.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

43.

Women are as old as they feel and men are old when they lose their feelings.

West, Mae

44.

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

45.

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

Aristophanes

46.

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

Gray, John

47.

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!

Herzen, Alexander

48.

Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men. The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, an act highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy.

Solanis, Valerie

49.

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

Cartland, Barbara

50.

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