quotations about women
No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.
REX STOUT
The Mother Hunt
Prejudice, in which there is truth, does cast, throughout the world but especially in France, a great stigma on the woman with whom no man has been willing to share the blessings or endure the ills of life. Now, there comes to all unmarried women a period when the world, be it right or wrong, condemns them on the fact of this contempt, this rejection. If they are ugly, the goodness of their characters ought to have compensated for their natural imperfections; if, on the contrary, they are handsome, that fact argues that their misfortune has some serious cause. It is impossible to say which of the two classes is most deserving of rejection. If, on the other hand, their celibacy is deliberate, if it proceeds from a desire for independence, neither men nor mothers will forgive their disloyalty to womanly devotion, evidenced in their refusal to feed those passions which render their sex so affecting. To renounce the pangs of womanhood is to abjure its poetry and cease to merit the consolations to which mothers have inalienable rights.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Vicar of Tours
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
U2
"Tryin' to Throw Your Arms Around the World"
Women use lovers as they do cards; they play with them a while, and when they have got all they can by them, throw them away, call for new ones, and then perhaps lose by the new all they got by the old ones.
ALEXANDER POPE
"Thoughts on Various Subjects"
Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
speech in San Francisco, July 1871
Women are not waiting around for lovers, they're living their lives. And believe it or not, having the morning to yourself is very zen.
KAITLYN WILDE
"Comic Artist Depicts Single Women They Way They Really Are -- Quite Content, Thank You Very Much", Bustle, February 9, 2016
A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.
HENRIK IBSEN
From Ibsen's Workshop
Men do foolish things thoughtlessly, knowing not why; but no woman doeth aught without a reason.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
We never see the mass of women en costume, without being reminded of the artificial flies used in angling--tricked out, also, with much the same object, only that, like St. Peter, women are "fishers of men."
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Woman loves or hates: she knows no middle course.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Advertiser, September 9, 2004
Men can sleep with a different woman every night and indulge in the most revolting practices--but let an unmarried woman make one mistake, be led astray when she's young and silly and knows nothing of the world, and she's tainted for life and called a harlot!
SUSANNE ALLEYN
Game of Patience
A woman's love, like lichens upon a rock, will still grow where even charity can find no soil to nurture itself.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Neurotic's Notebook
Merely external emancipation has made of the modern woman an artificial being.... Now, woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation, if she really desires to be free.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation", Anarchism and Other Essays
Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Idylls of the King
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 had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it were the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
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
Oh! too convincing -- dangerously dear --
In woman's eye the unanswerable tear!
LORD BYRON
The Corsair