Motivational Quotes

Women

There is very little difference between men and women in space.

- Sharman, Helen

Best Quotes about Women

Men are gentle, honest and straightforward. Women are convoluted, deceptive and dangerous.

Pizzey, Erin

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

Jong, Erica

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

Just as women are afraid of receiving, men are afraid of giving.

Gray, John

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

Lawrence, D. H.

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

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

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

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

Luce, Clare Boothe

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Steele, Sir Richard

13.

The man of the house can destroy the pleasure of the household, but he cannot make it. That rests with the woman, and it is her greatest privilege.

Helps, Sir Arthur

14.

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

15.

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

Carter, Angela

16.

If women were humbler, men would be more honest.

Vanbrugh, Sir John

17.

Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.

French, Marilyn

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Korda, Michael

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Don't you realize that as long as you have to sit down to pee, you'll never be a dominant force in the world? You'll never be a convincing technocrat or middle manager. Because people will know. She's in there sitting down.

Delillo, Don

25.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Woolf, Virginia

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

Martineau, Harriet

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

The mouth of a cannon is safer that the mouth of a woman scorned.

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

Hepburn, Katharine

36.

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

Diderot, Denis

37.

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

Reagan, Nancy

38.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse -- as a luxury befitting a young man.

Stendhal, Henri B.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

There are certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are of pretty woman to deserve them.

Austen, Jane

42.

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

43.

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

Boccaccio, Giovanni

44.

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

Bagehot, Walter

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Woolf, Virginia

48.

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

Archard, Marcel

49.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

50.

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