Motivational Quotes

Women

If all men are born free, why is it that all women are born slaves?

- Astell, Mary

Best Quotes about Women

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

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

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.

A woman might claim to retain some of the child's faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.

Greer, Germaine

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

The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly... men don't like it.

Wilde, Oscar

The cocks may crow, but it's the hen that lays the egg.

Thatcher, Margaret

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

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

Austen, Jane

10.

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

11.

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

Diderot, Denis

12.

A man's idea in a game of cards is war, cruel, devastating, and pitiless. A lady's idea of it is a combination of larceny, embezzlement and burglary.

Dunne, Finley Peter

13.

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

Chanel, Coco

14.

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

Woolf, Virginia

15.

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

Gray, John

16.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

Men never remember, but women never forget.

18.

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

West, Mae

19.

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

Sand, George

20.

Men mourn for what they have lost; women for what they ain't got.

Billings, Josh

21.

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

22.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

Stark, Freya

23.

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

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.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Meir, Golda

29.

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.

30.

A woman should say: Have I made him happy? Is he satisfied? Does he love me more than he loved me before? Is he likely to go to bed with another woman? If he does, then it's the wife's fault because she is not trying to make him happy.

Cartland, Barbara

31.

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

Geraldy, Paul

32.

Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others.

Earhart, Amelia

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

A lady is nothing very specific. One man's lady is another man's woman; sometimes, one man's lady is another man's wife. Definitions overlap but they almost never coincide.

Lynes, Russell

36.

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

37.

Women make love for love, men make love for lust.

Harge, Derrick

38.

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

39.

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.

Durrell, Lawrence

40.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Wilde, Oscar

41.

Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man -- it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.

Diderot, Denis

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Rooney, Mickey

45.

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

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

48.

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

Evans, Dame Edith

49.

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

50.

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