Women
» “These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can’t live with them, or without them.”
– Aristophanes
» ”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.”
– 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
» ”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
» ”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
» ”Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.”
– Anita Brookner
» ”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
» ”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
» ”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
» ”Eve is a twofold mystery.”
– 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
» ”The trouble with some women is they get all excited about nothing, and then they marry him.”
– Cher
» ”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
» ”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
» ”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 especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.”
– Margaret Fuller
» ”The Woman-Soul leadeth us upward and on!”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
» ”The higher mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial male who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not lose a single trait of her character.”
– Emma Goldman
» ”Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky ass, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.”
– Germaine Greer
» ”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.”
– Germaine Greer
» ”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.”
– Germaine Greer
» ”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.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
» ”To me the ”female principle” is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
» ”We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
» ”What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!”
– Alexander Herzen
» ”If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character.”
– Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
» ”A woman’s whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless — for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”
– Washington Irving
» ”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.”
– Selma James
» ”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.”
– Elizabeth Janeway
» ”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!”
– Erica Jong
» ”There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness — her selfishness, in short — is a reproach to the American way of life.”
– Erica Jong
» ”The real thinking of woman is pre-eminently practical and applied. It is something we describe as sound common sense, and is usually directed to what is close at hand and personal. In general, it can be said that feminine mentality manifests an undeveloped, childlike, or primitive character; instead of the thirst for knowledge, curiosity; instead of judgment, prejudice; instead of thinking, imagination or dreaming; instead of will, wishing. Where a man takes up objective problems, a woman contents herself with solving riddles; where he battles for knowledge and understanding, she contents herself with faith or superstition, or else she makes assumptions.”
– Emma Jung
» ”The common foible of women who have been handsome is to forget that they are no longer so.”
– Francois De La Rochefoucauld
» ”The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.”
– D. H. Lawrence
» ”The chief thing about a woman — who is much of a woman — is that in the long run she is not to be had… She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation — none of them — not in the long run. In the long run she only says ”Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me.” And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.”
– D. H. Lawrence
» ”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.”
– Fran Lebowitz
» ”Woman is the Nigger of the World.”
– John Lennon
» ”You don’t know a woman until you have received a letter from her.”
– Ada Leverson
» ”But if God had wanted us to think just with our wombs, why did He give us a brain?”
– Clare Boothe Luce
» ”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.”
– Russell Lynes
» ”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
» ”If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.”
– Harriet Martineau
» ”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.”
– Giuseppe Mazzini
» ”To be successful, a woman has to be better at her job than a man.”
– Golda Meir
» ”I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.”
– George Meredith
» ”Aren’t women prudes if they don’t and prostitutes if they do?”
– Kate Millet
» ”The great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young.”
– Kate Millet
» ”We are educated in the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason; if some few get above their nurses instructions, our knowledge must rest concealed and be as useless to the world as gold in the mine.”
– Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
» ”If it weren’t for women, men would still be wearing last week’s socks.”
– Cynthia Nelms
» ”Women are considered deep — why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
» ”If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
» ”Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her.”
– Anais Nin
» ”If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.”
– Aristotle Onassis
» ”Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman’s attention.”
– Camille Paglia
» ”If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.”
– Camille Paglia
» ”Woman — for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: ”Blind yourself, for I am blind.””
– Luigi Pirandello
» ”Most women have no characters at all.”
– Alexander Pope
» ”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.”
– Jeannette Rankin
» ”A woman is like a teabag — only in hot water do you realize how strong she is.”
– Nancy Reagan
» ”I buy women shoes and they use them to walk away from me.”
– Mickey Rooney
» ”Woman! The peg on which the wit hangs his jest, the preacher his text, the cynic his grouch, and the sinner his justification!”
– Helen Rowland
» ”Woman’s destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her.”
– Marquis De Sade
» ”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.”
– George Sand
» ”I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.”
– Becky Sharp
» ”The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.”
– George Bernard Shaw
» ”There is a growing strength in women, but it’s in the forehead, not in the forearm.”
– Beverly Sills
» ”The clich
