quotations about women
What man can pretend to know the riddle of a woman's mind?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living, October 7, 1940
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
Men may weary by their constancy, but women never.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Love is wont to visit Man in the company of Desire; but Woman by himself.
RICHARD GARNETT
De Flagello Myrtes
It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave--subject--inferior--dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
introduction, History of Woman Suffrage
I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
GEORGE MEREDITH
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
TIMOTHY LEARY
attributed, Was It Good for You Too?
No man ever reaches manhood
till a woman's tenderness
is a part of his possession.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"The Conquerors"
Men are often like that. They grow bored with simple goodness and want a woman who is dangerous, a challenge.
SUSANNE ALLEYN
Game of Patience
I call 'em complaining machines. Things are never right with a guy to them. And man, when you throw that hysteria in there ... forget it. I gotta get out, get in the car, and go. Anywhere. Get a cup of coffee somewhere. Anywhere. Anything but another woman. I guess they're just built different, right?
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Interview Magazine, September 1987
Men do foolish things thoughtlessly, knowing not why; but no woman doeth aught without a reason.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
TONI MORRISON
Newsweek, March 30, 1981
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
The spirit of Eve is strong in all her daughters.
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
Rose in Bloom
The prolonged slavery of woman is the darkest page in human history.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
introduction, History of Woman Suffrage
If I could remake the world, I'd banish women, send them away with all their trouble. Then children would come from a purer source.
EURIPIDES
Medea
Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
A bride at her second marriage does not wear a veil. She wants to see what she is getting.
HELEN ROWLAND
A Guide to Men
Woman is like a diamond with many facets: the imagination of man, the light which produces from them innumerable permutations and combinations of color. The character of woman is comparatively simple, but man imagines much and attributes it to her.
CHARLES EDWARD JERNINGHAM
The Maxims of Marmaduke