quotations about women
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
Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Tower", The Tower
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
A woman's passion is like the tide, it stays for no man when the hour is come.
APHRA BEHN
The Lucky Chance
A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.
COCO CHANEL
The Gospel According to Coco Chanel
Centuries roll, customs change, but, ever since the time of the earliest mother, woman yearns to be the soother.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Pausanias, the Spartan
The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The Philanderer
A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Women ... have long been discouraged from the awareness and forthright expression of anger. Sugar and spice are the ingredients from which we are made. We are the nurturers, the soothers, the peacemakers, and the steadiers of rocked boats.
HARRIET LERNER
The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships
There are two kinds of spiritual law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and another, altogether different, in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life the woman is judged by man's law, as though she were not a woman but a man.
HENRIK IBSEN
From Ibsen's Workshop
A man in love ... is the master, so it seems, but only if his lady friend permits it! The need to interchange the roles of slave and master for the sake of the relationship is never more clearly demonstrated than in the course of an affair. Never is the complicity between victim and executioner more essential. Even chained, down on her knees, begging for mercy, it is the woman, finally, who is in command ... the all powerful slave, dragging herself along the ground at her master's heels, is now really the god. The man is only her priest, living in fear and trembling of her displeasure.
PAULINE RÉAGE
introduction, The Image
It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Letter from an Unknown Woman
You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain fatally downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.
VLADIMIR LENIN
"The Tasks of the Working Women's Movement in the Soviet Republic", Collected Works
A woman, like a cross-eyed man, looks one way, but goes another--hence her mysteriousness.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The original oppression of Woman was based on crude denigration. She caused Man to fall, so she became a scapegoat. No, not a scapegoat which might be blameless but a culprit richly deserving of whatever suffering Man chose thereafter to heap on her. That is Woman in the Book of Genesis. Out here, our ancestors, without the benefit of hearing about the Old Testament, made the very same story differing only in local color. At first the Sky was very close to the Earth. But every evening Woman cut off a piece of the Sky to put in her soup pot, or in another version, she repeatedly banged the top end of her pestle carelessly against the Sky whenever she pounded millet or, as in yet another rendering -- so prodigious is Man's inventiveness, she wiped her kitchen hands in the Sky's face. Whatever the detail of Woman's provocation, the Sky moved away in anger, and God with it.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
The marginalization of women's voices in the news media under-values their potential contributions to society, and in the processes, diminishes democracy.
CYNTHIA CARTER
"On The Internet, Women Are Still Seen And Not Heard", Vocativ, February 8, 2016
What a thing of fantasy a woman may become after dusk.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Ferragus, chef des Dévorants
Ah! What pleasure it must be to a woman to suffer for the one she loves!
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
In a society that is becoming desensitized, robotic and in some cases debilitatingly prescriptive. Women are faking orgasms more -- maybe to just get it all over with.
PAMELA ANDERSON
blog post, Pamela Anderson Foundation, March 30, 2017
No man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket.
REX STOUT
Some Buried Caesar