quotations about women
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
Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love.
ALFRED TENNYSON
Idylls of the King
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
The burning gaze of a young woman, such as hath tasted man, shall not escape me; for I have a spirit keen to mark these things.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Toxotides
Grab a woman. Help the movement. Liberate a woman tonight. You'll get stale out here in the woods, living like a bear. Your balls will shrink, your tongue grow stiff and heavy. Your mind will wither away. Whatever became of William Gatlin? Went mad flogging his bloody duff.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Serpents of Paradise
My son, beware of a plain damsel who charmeth thee, for she needeth much wile, and useth diverse weapons.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.
JAMES THURBER
"The Duchess and the Bugs", Lanterns & Lances
I've always felt there are two things a woman should never do after the age of thirty-five: stand in natural light and have a baby.
ERMA BOMBECK
Family: The Ties that Bind ... and Gag!
A woman who can threaten your life before breakfast is the only sort of woman worth having.
NORA ROBERTS
Black Hills
Women are like that they don't acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bed-clothing in slumber fertilizing the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it ever existed or no.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
If thou makest a statement concerning women, lo, she shall immediately try to disprove it straightway. She goeth by contraries.
GELETT BURGESS
The Maxims of Methuselah
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
It took him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of her smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
If a woman's got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it's thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!
D. H. LAWRENCE
Sons and Lovers
A woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
J. M. COETZEE
Disgrace
A woman's heart is much like the moon, always changing but always has a man in it.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Any woman may act the part of a coquette successfully who has the reputation without the scruples of modesty. If a woman passes the bounds of propriety for our sakes, and throws herself unblushingly at our heads, we conclude it is either from a sudden and violent liking, or from extraordinary merit on our parts, either of which is enough to turn any man's head who has a single spark of gallantry or vanity in his composition.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Woman's great strength lies in being late or absent. Presence immediately reveals the weak points of our beloved; when she is absent she become one of the sylph-like figures of our adolescence whom we endowed with perfection.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
Don't tell me about God having made such creatures to be companions for us! I don't say but He might make Eve to be a companion for Adam in Paradise--there was no cooking to be spoilt there, and no other woman to cackle with and make mischief; though you see what mischief she did as soon as she'd an opportunity.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede