Quotes about women

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

Woolf, Virginia on women
6 fans of this quote   

"Women serve but to keep a man from better company."

Wycherley, William on women   

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

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

Austen, Jane on women
3 fans of this quote   

"To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive."

Austen, Jane on women
4 fans of this quote   

"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 on women
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".. it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have."

Barrie, Sir James M. on women   

"What Women Want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What Men Want: Tickets for the world series."

Barry, Dave on women
5 fans of this quote   

"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 on women   

"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 on women   

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

Bird, Caroline on women
3 fans of this quote   

"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 on women   

"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 on women
6 fans of this quote   

"Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything."

Brookner, Anita on women
6 fans of this quote   

"It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to."

Brookner, Anita on women
3 fans of this quote   

"Eve is a twofold mystery."

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett on women   

"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 on women   

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

Byron, Lord on women   

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

Carter, Angela on women
6 fans of this quote   

"I have always found women difficult. I don't really understand them. To begin with, few women tell the truth."

Cartland, Barbara on women
7 fans of this quote   

"The trouble with some women is they get all excited about nothing, and then they marry him."

Cher on women
8 fans of this quote   

"You may be a princess or the richest woman in the world, but you cannot be more than a lady."

Churchill, Jennie Jerome on women
6 fans of this quote   

"Women are a sisterhood. They make common cause in behalf of the sex; and, indeed, this is natural enough, when we consider the vast power that the law gives us over them."

Cobbett, William on women
3 fans of this quote   

"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 on women
3 fans of this quote   

"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 on women   

"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 on women   

"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 on women   

"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 on women   

"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 on women   

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

Duras, Marguerite on women   

"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 on women
3 fans of this quote   

"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 on women
9 fans of this quote   

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

Earhart, Amelia on women
6 fans of this quote   

"A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt."

Eliot, George on women   

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"The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history."

Eliot, George on women
4 fans of this quote   

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"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 on women
3 fans of this quote   

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on women
4 fans of this quote   

"The girl with a future avoids a man with a past."

Esar, Evan on women
7 fans of this quote   

"Of all things upon earth that bleed and grow, a herb most bruised is woman."

Euripides on women
5 fans of this quote   

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

Evans, Dame Edith on women
5 fans of this quote