quotations about women
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
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, "Perhaps this is THE man."
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
When women let their hair down, it means either sexiness or craziness or death, the three by Victorian times having become virtually synonymous.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For"
Seen through the glow of a building orgasm, a woman seems to blaze with angelic glory.
LARRY NIVEN
Ringworld
That's just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what's good for a man, and she's going to see he gets it; and no matter if he's starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she's got him, and is giving him what's good for him.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
Woman loves or hates: she knows no middle course.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
Women are books, and men the readers be,
Who sometimes in those books erratas see;
Yet oft the reader's raptured with each line,
Fair print and paper, fraught with sense divine;
Tho' some, neglectful, seldom care to read,
And faithful wives no more than bibles heed.
Are women books? says Hodge, then would mine were
An Almanack, to change her every year.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack
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
Because a woman brought death
a bright Maiden overcame it,
and so the highest blessing
in all of creation
lies in the form of a woman,
since God has become man
in a sweet and blessed Virgin.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN
"Quia ergo femina"
Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Women
The beauty of a woman transcends all other forms of beauty, as well in the sweetness of its suggestions, as in the fervor of the admiration it awakens. The beauty of a lovely woman is an inspiration, a sweet delirium, a gentle madness. Her looks are love-potions. Heaven itself is never so clearly revealed to us as in the face of a beautiful woman.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
While it won't shock anyone to learn that Y chromosomes are overrepresented in news coverage, a new study found that women are more likely to appear in photographs than in the text of news stories. Researchers in the United Kingdom used artificial intelligence software to catalogue an enormous corpus of English-language news on the Internet. They vacuumed up 2.3 million articles published by 950 online news sources, from the BBC to the New York Post, over six months from October 2014 to April 2015. They used AI programs to search for faces in the articles' lead images and categorize them by gender. Names in the text of news sources or subjects were also sorted by gender. "The proportion of females was consistently higher in images than in text, for virtually all topics and news outlets," the researchers wrote in the article published in the journal PLOS ONE by researchers from the University of Bristol and Cardiff University.
JOHN TOZZI
"Women Are 'Eye Candy,' Not News Sources, Online", Bloomberg Business, February 4, 2016
A man who admires a fine woman, has yet not more reason to wish himself her husband, than one who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Women are leaders everywhere you look--from the CEO who runs a Fortune 500 company to the housewife who raises her children and heads her household. Our country was built by strong women and we will continue to break down walls and defy stereotypes.
NANCY PELOSI
Glamour Magazine, January 2007
Women, you overheated dipsomaniacs, never passing up a chance to wangle a drink, a great boon to bartenders but a bane to us--not to mention our crockery and our woolens!
ARISTOPHANES
Women at the Thesmophoria
It's a strange thing to think of a man as can lift a chair with his teeth, and walk fifty mile on end, trembling and turning hot and cold at only a look from one woman out of all the rest i' the world. It's a mystery we can give no account of.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
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
I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
Your anatomy is a mystery that nobody bothers explaining to us. Even when we think we have mastered one woman's body, every body is different.
CHRIS ABANI
"What Men Aren't Telling Us", O Magazine, July 2008
To desire to be perpetually in the society of a pretty woman until the end of one's days, is as if, because one likes good wine, one wished always to have one's mouth full of it.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
The Silence of Colonel Bramble