quotations about women
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Tower", The Tower
A woman's passion is like the tide, it stays for no man when the hour is come.
APHRA BEHN
The Lucky Chance
A reproof entereth more into a woman of sense than an hundred compliments into a fool.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Women are slaves to their beauty.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.
LOUISE ERDRICH
Four Souls
The societies to which I have been exposed seemed to me largely machines for the suppression of women.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
The change needed to restore good feeling cannot be reached by remanding women to the spinning wheel, and the contentment of her grandmother, but by conceding to her every right which the spirit of the age demands. Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
introduction, History of Woman Suffrage
Most of the women claimed to be emancipated and independent, as indeed they were in the sense that they were earning their own living. But they paid for it by the suppression of the mainsprings of their natures; fear of public opinion robbed them of love and intimate comradeship. It was pathetic to see how lonely they were, how starved for male affection, and how they craved children. Lacking the courage to tell the world to mind its own business, the emancipation of the women was frequently more of a tragedy than traditional marriage would have been. They had attained a certain amount of independence in order to gain their livelihood, but they had not become independent in spirit or free in their personal lives.
EMMA GOLDMAN
Living My Life
Hurry not a woman's favor; neither forcer her hastily to surrender to thee. For she goeth into love as she goeth into the waters at the seashore; first a hand and then a lip goeth she in by littles. She diveth not, she leapeth not from the pier; but by gentle shocks and cries of protest she entereth slowly; yet when the waters of love encompass her, then she is supported. She swimmeth in her joy; she floateth on the tide of happiness.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
As a woman, I have an inherent need to be all things to all people, to make certain everybody's taken care of. I know I can't sustain that level all the time, so I'm finding the proper balance and it's made me infinitely happier.
SARAH JESSICA PARKER
Woman's Day Magazine, September 12, 2007
A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
NORMAN MAILER
attributed, The Book of Poisonous Quotes
What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, November 13, 1938
This is woman's great benevolence, that she will become a martyr for beauty, so that the world may have pleasure.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
Irish & English: Portraits and Impressions
There is such a thing as the wrong woman. She makes a man a fraction.... But the right woman! She multiplies a man.
HORACE HOLLEY
"The Genius"
There is nothing in the female sex more graceful or becoming than Modesty. It adds charm to their beauty, and gives a new softness to their sex. Without it simplicity and innocence appear rude; reading and good sense, masculine; wit and humour, lascivious. This is so necessary a quality for pleasing, that the loose part of the sex, whose study it is to ensnare men's hearts, never fail to support the appearance of what they know is essential to that end.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Nature admits of no permanence in the relation between man and woman.... It is only man's egoism that wants to keep woman like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence, have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and legalities.
LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH
Venus in Furs
It is pointless for a woman to be young unless pretty, or to be pretty unless young.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats--including to mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women's mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers. Here, we assess one such cue: other women's fertility. Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other women's romantic relationships.
JAIMIA ARONA KREMS & REBECCA NEEL
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, January 14, 2016
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
A Room of One's Own