quotations about women
Woman began at zero, and has through ages slowly unfolded and risen. Each age has protested against growth as unsexing woman.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
Frailty, thy name is woman.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
A man who from the beginning has long been soaked in the languid atmosphere of a woman, the scent of her hands, her bosom, her knees, her hair, her lithe and flowing clothes ... has acquired a delicacy of skin, a refinement of tone, a kind of androgyny without which the toughest and most virile of geniuses remains, when it comes to artistic perfection, an incomplete being.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Un mangeur d'opium"
For I cannot think that GOD Almighty ever made them [women] so delicate, so glorious creatures; and furnished them with such charms, so agreeable and so delightful to mankind; with souls capable of the same accomplishments with men: and all, to be only Stewards of our Houses, Cooks, and Slaves.
DANIEL DEFOE
The Education of Women
The successful woman has a secret. She's learned that she owes it to herself, her children, and the world to make the contribution she was born to make. She's learned to ask for advice and help, to insist on getting paid what she's worth, and to set boundaries at work and at home so that her needs get met, not trampled. She puts her dreams at the top of her priorities list, not at the bottom. She feels great about being recognized for her accomplishments, and she's totally OK with the fact that not everyone is going to like her when she stands up to those who would discount her or put her down.
DEBRA CONDREN
Good Housekeeping, August 2010
The only way to win a wench is not to woo her; the only way to have her fast is to have her loose.
THOMAS DEKKER
Blurt, Master Constable
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
There is no beast, no rush of fire, like woman so untamed. She calmly goes her way where even panthers would be shamed.
ARISTOPHANES
Lysistrata
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"
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
What, then, is feminine as contrasted with masculine? what is womanly as compared with manly, whether in literature or in life? Men and women have many qualities in common, and resemble more than they differ from each other. But while, speaking generally, the man's main occupations lie abroad, the woman's main occupation is at home. He has to deal with public and collective interests; she has to do with private and individual interests. We need not go so far as to say, with Kingsley, that man must work and woman must weep; but at least he has to fight and to struggle, she has to solace and to heal. Ambition, sometimes high, sometimes low, but still ambition--ambition and success are the main motives and purpose of his life. Her noblest ambition is to foster domestic happiness, to bring comfort to the afflicted, and to move with unostentatious but salutary step over the vast territory of human affection. While man busies himself with the world of politics, with the world of commerce, with the rise and fall of empires, with the fortunes and fate of humanity, woman tends the hearth, visits the sick, consoles the suffering--in a word, in all she does, fulfils the sacred offices of love.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Women are cats ... and love to scratch even those they're fond of. Sometimes the more they love them the harder they scratch.
WILLIAM JOHN LOCKE
Septimus
Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain,
Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies.
JOHN KEATS
"Woman! When I Behold Thee"
Seen through the glow of a building orgasm, a woman seems to blaze with angelic glory.
LARRY NIVEN
Ringworld
When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Muse of the Department
Speak no evil of women; I tell thee the meanest of them deserves our respect; for of women do we not all come?
PEDRO CALDERON DE LA BARCA
The Mayor of Zalamea
Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think -- in a deeper voice.
BILL COSBY
attributed, The Best Book of Useless Information Ever
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
A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it in taking them back.
EDGAR WATSON HOWE
Country Town Sayings