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

The individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.

Rankin, Jeannette

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

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

Woolf, Virginia

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

Gray, John

Girls we love for what they are; men for what they promise to be.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Byron, Lord

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

Bagehot, Walter

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.

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

10.

A man's brain has a more difficult time shifting from thinking to feeling than a women's brain does.

Angelis, Barbara De

11.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

12.

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

Gourmont, Remy De

13.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

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

Earhart, Amelia

15.

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

Bird, Caroline

16.

There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifery.

Mandeville, Bernard

17.

The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.

Fuller, Margaret

18.

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

Diderot, Denis

19.

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

James, Henry

20.

Were there no women, men might live like gods.

Dekker, Thomas

21.

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

Woolf, Virginia

22.

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

Duras, Marguerite

23.

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

Sharman, Helen

24.

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

Steele, Sir Richard

25.

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

Maciver, Robert M.

26.

Observe this, that tho a woman swear, forswear, lie, dissemble, back-bite, be proud, vain, malicious, anything, if she secures the main chance, she's still virtuous; that's a maxim.

Farquhar, George

27.

I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

28.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

Proust, Marcel

29.

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

Feather, William

30.

I don't know why women want any of the things men have when one the things that women have is men.

Chanel, Coco

31.

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

32.

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

Paglia, Camille

33.

When a woman behaves like a man why doesn't she behave like a nice man?

Evans, Dame Edith

34.

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

Angelis, Barbara De

35.

She even had a kind of special position among men: she was an exception, she fitted none of the categories they commonly used when talking about girls; she wasn't a cock-teaser, a cold fish, an easy lay or a sneaky bitch; she was an honorary person. She had grown to share their contempt for most women.

Atwood, Margaret

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.

Curtis, George William

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Woman is the Nigger of the World.

Lennon, John

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Porter, O. Henry

46.

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.

47.

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

Steinem, Gloria

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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