Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

Women serve but to keep a man from better company.

Wycherley, William

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

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

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

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

Dowling, Colette

It seems as though women keep growing. Eventually they can have little or nothing in common with the men they chose long ago.

Clark, Eugenie

What a strange thing man is; and what a stranger thing woman.

Byron, Lord

I buy women shoes and they use them to walk away from me.

Rooney, Mickey

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

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

Woolf, Virginia

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.

Austen, Jane

22.

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

Jong, Erica

23.

I'm anal retentive. I'm a workaholic. I have insomnia. And I'm a control freak. That's why I'm not married. Who could stand me?

Madonna

24.

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition.

Mencken, H. L.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

West, Mae

28.

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

Woolf, Virginia

29.

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

Korda, Michael

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Angelis, Barbara De

33.

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

Paglia, Camille

34.

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

Reagan, Nancy

35.

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.

36.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

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.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Mencken, H. L.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Feather, William

46.

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

Duras, Marguerite

47.

The woman is the home. That's where she used to be, and that's where she still is. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home -- will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because then he becomes one of the children.

Duras, Marguerite

48.

Femininity appears to be one of those pivotal qualities that is so important no one can define it.

Bird, Caroline

49.

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

Hoagland, Edward

50.

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