Motivational Quotes

Women

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

Best Quotes about Women

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

Man loves little and often. Woman much and rarely.

Basta

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

Millet, Kate

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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 great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Were there no women, men might live like gods.

Dekker, Thomas

No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.

Weininger, Otto

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

10.

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

Austen, Jane

11.

Men never remember, but women never forget.

12.

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

13.

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

Steele, Sir Richard

14.

Women are most fascinating between the ages of thirty-five and forty, after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass forty, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely.

Dior, Christian

15.

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

16.

The woman's vision is deep reaching, the man's far reaching. With the man the world is his heart, with the woman the heart is her world.

Grable, Betty

17.

It is not women's fault if we are so tender. It is in the nature of the lives we live. And further, it would be a terrible catastrophe if men had to live men's lives and women's also. Which is precisely what has happened today -- to women.

James, Selma

18.

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

Paglia, Camille

19.

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

20.

Women are natural guerrillas. Scheming, we nestle into the enemy's bed, avoiding open warfare, watching the options, playing the odds.

Kempton, Sally

21.

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

Porter, O. Henry

22.

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

Geraldy, Paul

23.

To be successful, a woman has to be better at her job than a man.

Meir, Golda

24.

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

25.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

26.

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

Pizzey, Erin

27.

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

28.

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Berger, John

29.

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

Aristophanes

30.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

31.

To be completely woman you need a master, and in him a compass for your life. You need a man you can look up to and respect. If you dethrone him it's no wonder that you are discontented, and discontented women are not loved for long.

Dietrich, Marlene

32.

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

Stephens, James

33.

He is half of a blessed man. Left to be finished by such as she; and she a fair divided excellence, whose fullness of perfection lies in him.

Shakespeare, William

34.

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

35.

Women serve but to keep a man from better company.

Wycherley, William

36.

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

37.

A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry,A woman's function plainly is... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

38.

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

39.

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

Reagan, Nancy

40.

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.

41.

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

Duras, Marguerite

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Reik, Theodor

45.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

James, Henry

49.

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe, she can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby, she can use her intuition instead of her brain, but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train.

Mcginley, Phyllis

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