Quotes about women

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later, for another thing, they die earlier.

— H. L. Mencken

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

— H. L. Mencken

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

— Kate Millet

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.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

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

— Friedrich Nietzsche

There are always women who will take men on their own terms. If I were a man I wouldn't bother to change while there are women like that around.

— Ann Oakley

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! . It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

— Margaret Oliphant

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

— Erin Pizzey

She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).

— O. Henry Porter

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

— O. Henry Porter

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

— Marcel Proust

If the wife sins, the husband is not innocent.

— Italian Proverb

Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that God has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for God's guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them.

— Qur'an

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

— Theodor Reik

I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters.

— Pierre Auguste Renoir

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.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son -- and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.

— Helen Rowland

Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can't be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half of the time.

— Helen Rowland

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through man's passions, nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.

— Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

— George Santayana

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.

— Olive Schreiner

Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it -- but there is.

— Olive Schreiner

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.

— William Shakespeare

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

— Helen Sharman

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

— George Bernard Shaw

When God created two sexes, he may have been overdoing it.

— Charles M. Smith

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.

— Lillian Smith

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.

— Valerie Solanis

The three sexes are men, women, and professors.

— J. E. Spingarn

A woman who takes things from a man is called a girlfriend, a man who takes things from a woman is called a gigolo.

— Ruthie Stein

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

— Gloria Steinem

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.

— Henri B. Stendhal

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

— James Stephens

The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

Either sex alone is half itself.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

— William M. Thackeray

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

— Margaret Thatcher

The anger that appears to be building up between the sexes becomes more virulent with every day that passes. And far from women taking the blame... the fact is that men are invariably portrayed as the bad guys. Being a good man is like being a good Nazi.

— David Thomas

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

— James Thurber

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

— Lana Turner

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

— Source Unknown

Men often give love for sex, women often give sex for love.

— Source Unknown

Men never remember, but women never forget.

— Source Unknown

If women were humbler, men would be more honest.

— Sir John Vanbrugh

For a man to strike any women is most brutal, and I, as well as everyone else, think this far worse than any attempt to shoot, which, wicked as it is, is at least more comprehensible and more courageous.

— Queen Victoria

Men mistake friendship, but not sex, for love; women mistake sex, but not friendship, for love.

— Peter Wastholm

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.

— Otto Weininger

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.

— Anna Wickham

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

— Oscar Wilde

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

— Oscar Wilde

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.

— Oscar Wilde

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.

— Oscar Wilde

Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.

— Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

— Virginia Woolf

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

— Virginia Woolf

Women serve but to keep a man from better company.

— William Wycherley

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

— Aristophanes

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

— Jane Austen

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.

— Honore De Balzac

.. 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.

— Sir James M. Barrie

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.

— Dave Barry

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.

— Charles Baudelaire

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.

— Jean Baudrillard

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

— Caroline Bird

Women have no wilderness in them. They are provident instead content in the tight hot cell of their hearts. To eat dusty bread.

— Louise Bogan

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.

— Anita Brookner

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

— Anita Brookner

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.

— Anita Brookner

Eve is a twofold mystery.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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!

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

— Lord Byron

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

— Angela Carter

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

— Barbara Cartland

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

— Cher

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

— Jennie Jerome Churchill

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.

— William Cobbett

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.

— Don Delillo

All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.

— Helene Deutsch

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.

— Denis Diderot

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.

— Isak Dinesen

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.

— Isak Dinesen

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.

— Christian Dior

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

— Marguerite Duras

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

— Lawrence Durrell

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.

— Andrea Dworkin

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

— Amelia Earhart

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.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Evan Esar

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

— Euripides

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

— Dame Edith Evans

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.

— George Farquhar

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.

— Kate Field

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?

— Sigmund Freud

The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.

— Betty Friedan

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

— Margaret Fuller